


Remains

by msdevindanielle



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Family, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-26
Updated: 2015-10-02
Packaged: 2018-03-15 05:35:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 22,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3435407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/msdevindanielle/pseuds/msdevindanielle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or the five times Fitz thought his family had become too small, and the one time he realized just how large it'd actually grown.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Pre-Pilot

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for Tumblr user maegar-is-ready, as a gift in celebration of my blog reaching a milestone follower count. It was so lovely getting to know Mae over the past couple of months, and I'm incredibly grateful that she won this little contest, not only because of her thought-provoking prompt but also because she's just the sweetest. Hope you like it, darlin!
> 
> I cheat a bit in the first chapter, but since it all takes place before the events in the Pilot, I hope we can let it slide just this once. ;)

Leopold Fitz could count on one hand the number of times he'd seen his mother cry.

Or, perhaps more specifically, the number of times his mother had  _let_  him see her cry.

There had been other moments, of course. Moments caught from around the corner, when she'd thought he'd been in the other room. Moments brushed away quickly with a light swipe of her finger. Moments in which she'd gone back to chopping vegetables, or swiftly turned away to open the refrigerator, or covered it up with a quiet cough. Moments in the dead of night, when he was supposed to have been asleep, when the walls of their tiny flat had been too thin to hide the sound.

He'd always wondered why she'd tried so hard to keep that part of herself hidden from him. As if by some stretch of the imagination her momentary weakness would taint his opinion of her. As if a falter in her smile or a chip in her spirit could somehow make her less of a mother in his eyes.

As if anything could diminish the fact that she was still the strongest person he'd ever known.

But those other moments, those instances in which she'd actually let her guard down long enough for him to see the raw emotion and pain in her expression, were seared into his memory, tied inseparably to the fear that had tightly gripped his chest at the sight of tears on his mother's face. Those memories were so vividly imprinted in his mind that they came back to haunt him, oftentimes in the hazy period between wakefulness and sleep. He could see each moment so clearly, even though he couldn't have been more than four years old the first time it'd happened.

It'd been the night of his father's funeral, after the rather short line of neighbors and friends had finally left the flat. The majority of the day had passed by in a whirlwind of strangers patting his head or handing him pudding, offering condolences for a man no one had known all that well. He'd been secretly thankful when his grandmother had whisked him away from the crowd and spent a couple of hours in his room, reading him his favorite stories whilst he methodically took apart his toy train set. He supposed he must've fallen asleep at one point, because the next thing he'd known he was waking up in his bed, a horrid taste in his mouth and the darkness nearly smothering him like a blanket on the hottest day of the year.

The sound of weeping hadn't been too loud, and in all honesty he couldn't even remember if he'd heard it at all. But in his fit of confusion he'd run to his parents' room, only realizing once he'd entered that the bed was half empty now.

"Leo?" his mum gasped, sounding like she was trying to regain control of her breathing. "What are you doing out of bed, darling? It's the middle of the night."

But he hadn't been able to answer, the sound and sight of his distraught mother overwhelming any words on the tip of his tongue. Instead, he quietly padded over to the bed, stopping just on the edge of the vast expanse of sheets that separated him from where his mother sat. He scarcely recognized her in that moment, the moonlight glinting off of her tear-streaked face.

"What is it, Leo?" she asked softly. And it was her voice that drove away his hesitancy in the end.

"Mummy, could I sleep with you tonight?"

She choked a little on her laughter, nodding vigorously as fresh tears spilled from her eyes. He wasted no time in clambering onto the bed, and though the cold emptiness threatened to swallow him whole, he managed to make it to the warmth of his mother's outstretched arms. Her sobs were still fairly quiet, but he wrapped his arms tightly around her, hoping that despite his smallness he'd be able to take her pain away.

"Oh, Leo," she murmured with another sob, peppering his face with kisses. "Oh, my sweet, darling boy. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry."

He knew that you were supposed to say sorry when you'd done something wrong. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't figure out what she was apologizing for. He pulled away, searching her eyes for an answer.

"Why, Mummy?"

Her tears had calmed down somewhat, but there was still a quiver in her jaw as she traced her fingertips along his brow. "I shouldn't have left you alone the other day," she whispered, but it was almost as if she were talking to herself instead of to him. "What a bloody foolish thing to do. I mean…my God, you're just a…just a wee little boy." Her voice had grown louder, and something dark flashed in her eyes. "How could you do that to a  _child_? Your  _own_  child, for God's…"

She stopped talking abruptly, probably noticing how he'd involuntarily flinched away from the noise. "Oh, no," she said, placing a shaking hand over her mouth. "Oh, Leo, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to scare you. It's all right, darling. You can come here. I won't hurt you."

He wanted to tell her that he knew she wouldn't hurt him. He wanted to say that he wasn't sure why he'd flinched in the first place, when the only time her voice had scared him had been when she'd fought with his father (and even then it wasn't her he'd been afraid of). He wanted to tell her that he hadn't been alone that day, not really. He wanted to tell her that Dad had been there.

He barely remembered that day, actually. He'd made some gadget or other by combining bits and pieces from some of his toys, but proud of it as he was he'd known better than to bother his father while he tinkered away in his office. He'd never been particularly close to his father, his job keeping him out of the house for most of the day with the rest spent either sleeping or avoiding him and Mum. At one point, his father had eventually stopped going to work, spending more time in his office instead. When the fights had broken out, he hid in his room, trying to block out the noise by focusing on his inventions.

It was never enough.

That day, Mum had left early for her job at the diner down the street, like she always did on Saturdays. For his part, he had woken up, made himself a bowl of cereal (he'd gotten better about not spilling the milk), watched a bit of cartoons, and played with his toys. And the rest of the morning had gone by rather uneventfully.

That is, of course, until he'd heard the gunshot.

He couldn't remember what had been in his hands, a part from a track or his toy screwdriver or the small magnifying glass he'd gotten for Christmas. But whatever had been in his hands had clattered to the floor, the singular crack drowning out all other sound until a low buzz had filled his ears. Hours later, his mum was prying him out from under his bed, where he'd lay shivering, blind and deaf to everything but the persistent sound of that shot. She'd carried him out of the flat, trying to shield his eyes along the way, but he'd already seen the blood, along with the motionless figure that had once been his dad.

Passed. Dead. Those were the words the strangers had used at the funeral, when they talked about his father. He didn't know if he understood what they meant. All he knew was that his father was gone. One day there, the next...not.

He wanted to tell his mum that he wasn't a little boy anymore, that he was big and strong and could take care of her, whether Dad was gone or not. But he didn't know how to tell her any of the things he wanted to. So instead he moved closer to her and reached up one of his small hands to wipe away her tears, like that one time she'd done for him when he'd fallen off his bicycle and scraped his knee. He didn't know if it would help, but it was all he could think of to do.

"I love you, Mummy. Please don't be sad."

She laughed again as she pulled him to her side. "Oh, Leopold Alexander Fitz," she sighed, running her fingers through his mess of curls. "You are without a doubt the greatest source of joy in my life. Where I would be without my brave little Leo, I should never care to know."

He didn't really know what to say to that, so he simply huddled closer to her while she stroked his back and hummed some sort of lullaby. Eventually, he heard her breathing slow down as the wordless song ended. But when he looked up into her face he saw that she was still awake.

"Mum?"

"Hmm?"

"Does it hurt?"

Her hand paused on his back as she focused her gaze on him. "Does what hurt, sweetie?"

"Being dead."

He wasn't sure where the question had come from, but he realized that it was the one thing that he'd been desperate to know ever since he'd tried to understand what had happened to his father. He'd heard phrases tossed around over the past few days, phrases like "he's in a better place" or "at least he isn't in pain now," but he didn't really get any of that. It didn't explain to him how one person could be there, only  _not_  there. Alive in one moment. Dead in the next.

His mother drew in a shaky breath, like she was trying to choose her words carefully. "Do you remember what it was like before you were born, Leo?"

He searched his short list of memories, but he shook his head.

"No, you don't, do you?" she smiled, though her eyes betrayed her forced cheerfulness. "But it couldn't have been too bad, yeah? Otherwise you'd remember all that nasty stuff, don't you think?"

He tried to process her words. "I…I think so," he agreed, finding that it made sense to him.

"Well, I like to think that being dead is quite like how life was before you were born," she told him as she continued to trace circles on his back. "If before didn't hurt, then after shouldn't be that much different. You shouldn't be afraid of dying, dear. It's living that's a lot harder."

There was a lot she was saying, and not all of it he thought he understood. But her tone was comforting. "Now, that's enough talk for tonight," she scolded him half-heartedly before pressing her lips to his forehead. "Try and get some sleep, all right?"

He nodded against her shoulder, drowsiness finally starting to overtake his senses. And as he drifted off in the warmth of his mother's arms, her words echoing in his head, his restless thoughts disappeared.

He was unaware that it would be the most peaceful night's sleep he'd have for decades.

* * *

The second time Fitz saw his mother cry wasn't until many years later. After they'd moved into a smaller flat, still managing to barely cover the rent with her three jobs. After he'd started offering to fix odds and ends for the neighbors, secretly adding the extra cash to the jar she kept in the kitchen. After he'd taken apart nearly everything in their tiny living space, much to his mother's annoyance (although he thought he caught her hiding a smile from time to time). After he had received recognition at his school's science fair, despite the fact that he'd been receiving low marks in his other classes. After he'd begun studying in Glasgow under one of the leading professors to develop some of the first quantum field generators. After he'd been accepted into a doctoral program at MIT.

When he came home that day, the day the letter had arrived, he wasn't really surprised by the inevitable conclusion. There was really no way he'd be able to afford studying in America, with or without her assistance. But he  _was_  surprised to see the tears in her eyes.

"Mum, what're you-"

"Oh, Leo," she interrupted, reaching up to wrap her arms around his neck. "I'm  _so_ , so proud of you. You know that, right?"

He returned the embrace, steeling himself for what he had to do. "You should be," he replied gravely as he stepped back and placed his hands on his waist. "Do you know I fixed that leaky compression faucet in under three minutes this morning,  _and_  I had to grind down the valve seat for the washer?" He shook his head. "Honestly, I'm surprised it even…" But his voice trailed off as he caught sight of his mother's expression, a mixture of confusion at his words and exasperation at his nonchalance. And the tears. God, the tears. He couldn't bear to see those tears. Not when he could do something about it.

Fitz put all of his effort into a shrug. "Didn't want to go anyway."

That earned him a weak swat on the arm, although Fitz vaguely wondered how such a small woman and such a small envelope could still manage to leave a lasting sting. "Don't lie to your mother," she said fiercely. But she couldn't look him in the eye.

He carefully placed his hands on her shoulders. "I'm not lying, mum," he told her gently, willing her to meet his gaze. "It's all overrated in the first place, isn't it? Besides, there's plenty of stuff they want me to work on here at the University. Really, I think you're blowing this out of proportion."

Keeping a straight face in that moment was the hardest thing he'd ever had to do, each word piercing him like a knife to his chest. But he knew he'd never be able to live with himself if he let her take on that guilt, not after everything she'd done for him.

She didn't look like she believed him, but at least she'd stopped crying. "You're meant for more than this, Leo," she sniffed, running her fingertips underneath her eyes. "And I know I couldn't make it happen this year, but one day I promise you you'll get over there. Whatever it takes."

Fitz breathed out slowly. "Bloody hell, woman," he chuckled. "If you wanted me to move out so badly, you could've just said so."

She gave his arm another half-hearted smack on her way to the kitchen. "You watch your tongue," she scolded him. "I'll not have that kind of language being thrown about under my roof. Blasted teenagers, thinking they can curse in front of their mothers whenever they damn well please." She turned away, and even though Fitz could hear the smirk in her voice, he knew she was still upset. But her momentary lapse in control was over.

A few weeks later, when MIT offered to completely fund his doctoral studies, his mum didn't cry, not in front of him at least. And when he boarded the plane to take him overseas, the uncertainty of his future looming ahead of him, he wondered what he was more afraid of: finding his way in a strange new country…or leaving behind the only family he'd ever known.

* * *

He stared down at the silent mobile in his hand, unable to comprehend the words that had been spoken on the other end. After a while, the phone was carefully wrenched from his grasp, and he felt gentle hands brush away what he took a moment to realize were tears. There was an inexplicable fear coursing through him, although the company did manage to dull the pain a little.

"She said…she said it was just a cold," he mumbled, vaguely registering that someone was gingerly extracting bits of glass from his other hand. He must have broken something in his distress. "Why…why wouldn't she tell me?"

"She probably just didn't want you to worry, Fitz," Simmons replied softly as she wrapped a bandage around his hand. "Even the doctors said they hadn't realized how serious it was."

He shook his head. "I still should've been there," he said, blinking past the bleariness in his eyes to look at her. He began heading towards the door. "I should be there now."

"Fitz, stop," Simmons pleaded as she placed a hand on his arm. And though he tried to extract himself from her grip, her insistent voice kept him rooted to the spot. "There's nothing you can do now, all right? Her doctors say she's recovering, that she'll be fine-"

"But she  _wasn't_  fine, Simmons!" he cried in frustration, loud enough to make her jump a little. "She's been in that hospital for  _two bloody months_ , without anyone there to…I mean, for God's sake, she could've…and I wouldn't have-"

"I know," she interrupted him, calmly stepping closer so he could see the sincerity in her expression. "I know, Fitz. And once this is all over, we'll go and see her, okay? We just have to sit tight for a little while. Can you do that?"

Fitz tried to focus on the warmth of her hands on his shoulders. Deep down, he knew she was right, that S.H.I.E.L.D. had placed all of its facilities on temporary lockdown until the situation in New Mexico had been resolved. Normally, Fitz would have been fascinated by the implications, how things like Einstein-Rosen bridges and life on other planets and mythical legends could not only exist but have direct ties to Earth. It was groundbreaking in every sense of the word, and meant an inevitable explosion of scientific development and discovery in the immediate future. But in that moment, Fitz couldn't bring himself to care.

He supposed he eventually nodded, because Simmons took another step closer. "Good," she said firmly, her grip tightening on his arms. "Now I need you to breathe, Fitz."

Her words didn't make sense right away, but he soon realized that he'd unintentionally been holding in his breath. His shoulders sunk forward with relief. As he gasped for air, though, he found that he was only able to regain control of his breathing when Simmons coached him through it. She counted the seconds for him, but it was really her own breathing that calmed him down in the end.

The rest of the night passed by in a blur for Fitz, as he and Simmons waited in one of SciOps's recreation rooms for HQ to give them the all-clear. Simmons dragged him to one of the sofas in the corner, away from the excited babble of their colleagues, away from the news coverage of aliens leveling a small town in the desert, away from the noise he didn't want to hear.

Neither of them slept, but she held onto his hand, tethering him to a reality that kept him away from the edge of his panic. As if by that simple touch, she could hold him together while the rest of the world around them was falling apart.

Somehow, it was enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Okay*, I know the first chapter is pretty bleak, but hopefully the later chapters won't be quite so heavy.
> 
> Also, I have many theories for what happened to Fitz's father, and this is just one of those theories that I've managed to settle on. Some of it might seem a little vague, but the issue will be addressed again in a future chapter.
> 
> As always, honest feedback is greatly appreciated! Thank you so much for taking the time to read. :)


	2. F.Z.Z.T.

There was absolutely.

No way.

In  _hell_.

That this was happening.

He stood on the edge of the precipice, staring down into the bed of clouds, completely frozen. He couldn't see a damn thing, he couldn't breathe, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't turn off the wheels in his head that constantly churned of their own accord, spouting out calculation after calculation that screamed one inevitable conclusion.

Ward wasn't going to make it.

Fitz hadn't wanted to count the seconds, or dwell at all on the laws of physics and aerodynamics. But he couldn't help it. He was an engineer. It was ingrained in him to know the speed at which she was falling, the force her small form would be subjected to when she hit the water, the angle her lips had curled upwards in the last remaining image he had of her before she'd jumped. Those eighteen seconds that separated Ward from Jemma were eighteen seconds too long, and whether or not Ward could successfully maneuver his freefall would hardly make a difference with that large of a discrepancy.

But Fitz wasn't capable of following through on such thoughts.

He gripped the sides of the cargo hold, so tightly he couldn't feel his fingers anymore, and stepped as close to the end of the ramp as he dared. He knew he wouldn't be able to see them. May was already hurtling them through Atlantic airspace at nearly a thousand miles an hour on the off chance that they'd reach the Sandbox in time. So Fitz's attempts to find them was never going to be fruitful. He knew that. He  _knew_ that.

And yet he couldn't bring himself to move.

Somewhere in the back of his subconscious, he was vaguely aware of the ground shifting underneath his feet. He tried to keep hold of his balance, but someone was also tugging on the edge of his shirt, pulling him backwards. None of this was as alarming to him as the fact that amidst it all, the cargo ramp was closing.

Fitz heaved in a gulp of icy air before he forced himself to snap out of it. "Ward's out there, too!" he shouted to Coulson, who was firmly pulling him away from the edge.

"I know!" Coulson replied over the wind, grabbing hold of one of the seats to keep them both from being blown out of the plane. "We'll get 'em when we land!"

It took a few moments for Fitz to process what Coulson had said, his last word echoing through the chamber as the cargo ramp sealed shut. And even then he had to sort through words like "Jemma" and "falling" and "statistically probable death" before he found his voice again.

"Land?" he panted.

Coulson didn't immediately reply, and if Fitz hadn't known better, he would've said he looked somewhat...embarrassed? But no, that didn't make any sense.

"We're…about fifty miles outside of Casablanca," he said hesitantly.

Fitz stared at his commanding officer in stunned silence, unable to believe what he'd just heard.

Of  _course_  they were that close to land.

_Of course they bloody were._

If Jemma was still alive (and she was, Fitz was sure of it, he couldn't comprehend the alternative), he was going to kill her.

Fitz's mind continued to speed along at a distressing rate, and he was pretty sure he wasn't breathing properly. But he managed to stay on Coulson's heels as they bounded up the staircase and charged into the Bus's comm room.

Skye's eyes widened as she glanced back and forth between Coulson and Fitz. "What-"

"Ward jumped after Simmons," Coulson explained tersely, bringing up a map of Western Africa on the Holocom. Fitz tried to remain focused on the task at hand, but all he could see was Jemma's face, the sickly pallor of her cheeks, her eyes darkened by hopelessness, wisps of her hair blowing in the breeze as they fell out of her usually neat ponytail, her body framed by a blue sky that seemed to mock his panic with its tranquility. It was an image that was permanently burned into his mind.

"She…she jumped?" Skye whispered, her voice catching in her throat. When neither of them answered her, she shook her head. "Well…well, he has a parachute, right?"

Coulson continued to ignore her while he zoomed the map in on a pair of blinking dots. " _He_   _has a parachute, doesn't he_?" Skye repeated hysterically.

Fitz dug his fingers into his waist, focusing on the discomfort as he tried not to think about how he'd been completely and utterly useless in getting the straps of the device over his own shoulders, or the likelihood that he would've been able to catch her in the first place.

No, as painful as it was for him to admit it, Fitz knew deep down that Ward was Jemma's best shot at making it out of this alive.

And he absolutely  _hated_  it.

Somewhere in the midst of his swirling thoughts, Fitz registered that Skye's gaze was boring into the side of his face, and he distantly remembered her asking some sort of insistent question about parachutes. He must've given her a distracted nod, because she stopped pestering him, even though she was still standing a bit too close.

"May?" Coulson asked loudly. "Why aren't we landing?"

May's voice resounded throughout the comm room. "We've got a bit of a problem."

Coulson opened his mouth, but before he could respond, another voice crackled in through the speakers. Fitz found himself unable to comprehend what was being said, and it took him a couple seconds to realize that it was because it was in a different language.

"This is Agent Coulson with S.H.I.E.L.D. six-one-six," Coulson announced once there was a pause in the slew of words. "I need an emergency landing for me and my team. Do you copy?"

A few moments passed before an answer came through, preceded by the sound of muffled voices. "You do not have the proper authorization to land here," another man replied in heavily accented speech.

Coulson's knuckles were white as he pressed them into the Holocom. "I  _know_  we don't have the proper authorization, that's why I'm  _asking_  you  _very nicely_  for an emergency landing. I've got-"

"HQ records indicate that S.H.I.E.L.D. six-one-six is currently en route to the Sandbox to deliver hazardous material."

Coulson pursed his lips together, looking positively livid. "Look, right now I've got two agents, one unconscious, down in fifty-degree water with no one to get them out and I'll be honest, I'm not feeling all that patient at the moment. So either we scrap the politics and you let me land, or as a Level Eight superior officer I'll personally see to it that you and your pals over there are all relocated to the Oymyakon branch. And let me tell you, white sandy beaches? They're not a thing in the Arctic."

Fitz held his breath in the silence that followed. After a beat, the accented voice returned. "We'll relay you through to the office."

"No, no," Coulson said quickly, leaning in towards the Holocom. "You-"

"Please hold."

Coulson briefly closed his eyes and sighed. "They better get me someone who speaks English," he muttered, almost to himself. "And not that idiot Thompson." He shook his head at Fitz and Skye. "I can't stand that guy."

Fitz was staring at the two blinking dots on the screen, but in his peripheral vision he saw Skye shift from one foot to the other. "Sir?" she asked, sounding somewhat strangled. "How long can-"

"Ward's a specialist, Skye," Coulson interrupted. "He's trained to tread water for hours at a time, even cold water and even with dead weight on him."

Fitz dug his fingers further into his side.

"Wait," Skye said breathlessly. "So…"

"Both Simmons and Ward still had their comm trackers in when they jumped," he explained, indicating the flashing markers on the map. He selected one of the dots and a live feed of vital information displayed on the screen. "Which means even though we can't make contact, we've still got this." Fitz could feel Coulson watching him while he stared at the infrequent yet existent spikes. "She's unconscious," he continued hesitantly. "But her heart's still beating."

Fitz heard a small sob next to his shoulder as Skye leaned against the Holocom. "Oh my God."

"I take it you guys managed to find a cure?" Coulson asked in a low voice, his eyes still trained on Fitz. And even though Fitz's thoughts were all over the place and he vaguely felt like he was going to vomit from relief, he heard the implicit question in Coulson's words:  _Is Simmons going to kill Ward?_

"The antiserum worked," Fitz choked out, blinking back tears and resisting the odd urge to laugh that he'd used the correct term. "But she didn't…" He shook his head as he saw the wind carry her away again. "She didn't know."

There wasn't any visible change in Coulson's expression, but he gave Fitz a curt nod. "We'll get 'em out as soon as we can," he promised. "Even if we have to resort to a vertical landing in the middle of the Atlantic."

"Not gonna happen, Coulson," May said through the comms. "They'll shoot us down if we go below three thousand feet."

Coulson simply blinked. "We'll get 'em out as soon as we can."

The next two hours were (up to that point) the longest two hours of Fitz's life. The agony of that interim period, of being stuck in the limbo of knowing and not knowing, was so acute that he thought he was going to go mad. Perhaps he was already mad. He didn't know. He just wanted to know why the bloody hell Jemma and Ward were still not out of the water. Ward might be skilled and all that, but hypothermia was still hypothermia.

Sometime in between one of Coulson's threat-laced tirades to Agent Thompson (because it  _was_  Agent Thompson, of course) and the dispatch of a chopper to the specified coordinates (the fastest compromise they could achieve), Fitz left the comm room, hoping that maybe he could push down the panic by pacing or something. He didn't realize where he was heading until he was standing at the door of her bunk.

It shouldn't have surprised him, really. What had he been expecting to see anyway? An empty room? Aside from the painfully absent occupant, everything looked exactly the same. The meticulously-made bed, with not so much as a wrinkle in the duvet. The two framed photographs on the shelf, one of her parents and one with him on the day they graduated from SciTech. The assortment of scientific journals and her favorite books placed in strategic spots. It was all so very…Jemma.

And yet, it was the fact that everything looked the same that twisted his gut the most. Because everything was not the same. Everything was different, and she wasn't there, and she was supposed to be there, and  _this was not supposed to happen_. Not to her.

Not to him.

Not to them.

Feeling bile in the back of his throat, he turned away and walked over to one of the small windows set into the plane. As he rested his head on the cool glass, he felt the warmth of someone standing near his side, and a small hand on his back.

"She's gonna be okay, Fitz," Skye murmured. Fitz had to breathe out slowly to keep from doing something reflexively stupid like lash out at her. He knew she was only trying to help, that she wore her heart on her sleeve and cared about Jemma and Ward much more than any other field agent would. But there was something wrong about the feeling of her fingertips on his arm, and the fact that she was standing too close to him, and the never-ending sea stretched out below them with no sign of the people they were looking for. It felt like he was being suffocated.

If the circumstances had been any different, Fitz might have laughed. Because a day before (hell, three hours before), he would've been thrilled at the prospect that she was not only in such close proximity to him but also that she was trying to hold his hand. Maybe it was because of his anxiety or maybe it was because it just didn't feel right, but as much as he liked Skye and appreciated her attempt to comfort him, her presence was doing very little to drive away his panic.

He didn't want to hurt her, though, so he tried to give her some semblance of a nod or a smile before he extricated himself from her grip and went back to the Holocom, where Coulson continued his exasperated negotiations with the Moroccan S.H.I.E.L.D. office.

Eventually, a rescue team was dispatched from the base and May was finally permitted to land the Bus, on the condition that as soon as Jemma and Ward were processed they proceeded on their way to the Sandbox with the Chitauri helmet. Jemma was examined and released a little too quickly for Fitz's comfort, especially considering that she was still unconscious, but he figured everyone was a bit on edge from the potential spread of the alien virus and wanted them gone as soon as possible. Fitz thought about arguing that they had, in fact, developed an antiserum to counteract the virus. But for the sake of Coulson's sanity, he kept the information to himself. The sooner they dropped off the helmet, the sooner they could try to move past this entire situation.

If they even  _could_  move past it. Fitz still wasn't quite certain that that was even possible.

As soon as Ward carefully set Jemma down on her bed, he immediately headed towards the cockpit to get them back up in the air while May and Skye worked on getting Jemma into clean, warm clothes. Outside the comm room, where Coulson was fielding (or ignoring) calls from HQ, Fitz quietly paced back and forth, not really seeing or hearing anything. And when May joined Coulson in his office, with Skye making a beeline for the cockpit to most likely interrogate Ward, Fitz found himself once again in the doorway of her bunk.

If anyone else had seen her there at that moment, lying peacefully under an absurd amount of blankets, they would never have guessed that she had just attempted to end her life by jumping out of an airplane. Even Fitz was having trouble connecting the girl in front of him with what she'd done, despite the fact that the scene was still repeating itself over and over in his head.

Why had she done it? Did she really not value her own existence enough? But no, that hadn't been it. She'd done it to save the team, hadn't she? (To save him?) Jemma was more pragmatic than anyone he'd ever met. If she jumped, it meant she hadn't seen any other way. It meant that she'd mentally made a list of all the variables and come to the conclusion that she'd needed to remove herself from the equation.

Not that he agreed with her. Obviously, the antiserum had worked. But even if it hadn't, he wouldn't have given up. He would've kept trying, kept testing out antiserums, done anything and everything except give up. So  _why had she, then_? Didn't she know how important she was? To the world? To S.H.I.E.L.D.? To the team?

To him?

No. She didn't, did she? She didn't know.

(Because until now, he hadn't either.)

How could he not have known? How could he not have known that he couldn't handle losing the one person that understood him better than anyone else? How could he not have known how important she was? How could he not have realized that she'd been beside him the whole damn time?

Ten years. He'd been beside her for  _ten years_. He'd never had a friend last half as long as Jemma Simmons had. And as much as he loved his mum, she'd never been able to fully understand the way his brain worked. Jemma had. Jemma  _did_.

And he was such a bloody idiot that he didn't realize that until she'd thrown herself off a damn airplane. But that wasn't the worst part, was it? No. The  _worst_  part was that there wasn't a single thing he could do to stop her.

What a fantastic partner he was.

Fitz wasn't sure how long he leaned against her doorframe, simply watching her countenance as she slept on. Somewhere in the back of his mind he supposed it was a bit creepy, but he gave himself a pass under the circumstances. It wasn't every day that he almost lost his best friend.

As she began to stir awake, though, Fitz felt a moment of sudden panic and darted away from her room. He didn't know where his feet were taking him, but his eyes fell on the spiral staircase heading up to the top level of the Bus. Before he knew what was happening, he was up the steps and knocking on the open door to Coulson's office.

Coulson glanced up from a stack of papers on his desk. "What is it, Fitz?" he asked nervously, a flash of fear in his eyes. "Is she-"

"She's, um…she's fine," Fitz stammered as he became aware of how he must have appeared. "She's waking up now, I think." He powered forward before he could change his mind. "But sir, I was wondering if I could maybe ask you something."

Coulson still seemed a bit wary, but he gave some kind of shrug before going back to the papers in front of him. "Shoot."

"I was wondering if maybe…well, I mean, you don't  _have_  to, I suppose, I was just thinking that if…I don't know, if the  _opportunity_  arose, then perhaps you could-"

"You got a point, Fitz?" Coulson asked with a raised eyebrow.

Fitz let out a sigh, cursing himself for the whole disastrous enterprise. "I was wondering if maybe you'd consider putting me out more in the field. Sir."

The pen in Coulson's hand paused on the page. He looked up at Fitz again, tilting his head to the side as if he were trying to figure something out. After a few seconds, a look of realization dawned on his face, followed closely by an expression that was just a little too patronizing for Fitz's taste. "I know you were going to go after her, Fitz."

Fitz was momentarily thrown, but he shook his head once he realized what Coulson had implied. "That's not what this is about."

There was that raised eyebrow again, like Coulson didn't believe him or something. "Okay," he said unconvincingly. "So you're saying you… _want_  to leave the lab and walk into potentially life-endangering situations?"

"No!" Fitz protested quickly, feeling a burn in his cheeks. This had been a mistake. "I just meant that…what I was  _trying_  to say was that if-"

"I get it, Fitz," Coulson interrupted with a miniscule smirk that quickly disappeared. "And I'll think about it, okay? Let's just…" He sighed in exhaustion. "Let's just get this object the hell off my plane and relax for a little bit before we go down that road."

"Right, then," Fitz replied quietly, hoping he could salvage what small amount of dignity he had left and leave as quickly as possible.

But Coulson had thankfully gone back to his papers and was no longer paying any attention to him. "When you get a chance, could you send Simmons and Ward up here? I need to debrief them ASAP."

"Yes, of-of course, sir," Fitz said as he edged out the door.

"Hey, Fitz?" Coulson called out.

He spun around, bracing himself for further embarrassment. But Coulson was looking at him with an odd expression that Fitz thought resembled something like pride.

"She wouldn't be alive right now if it hadn't been for you."

What the hell was Coulson going on about? Fitz hadn't done a single bloody thing that day. Scraped some epithelial cells off a helmet, sure. But Jemma could have done that herself. And when it boiled down to it, she'd never needed him to create the antiserum.

There were a lot of reasons why Jemma was alive at the moment. But not one of those reasons was Fitz.

He gave Coulson a small nod, mostly just because he didn't have the energy to argue with him, and left the office. As he slowly descended the staircase into the Bus's common area, he was so wrapped up in his own thoughts that he almost didn't see Jemma rushing towards him.

In that moment, there was nothing he wanted more than to wrap his arms around her and basically never let go. So he surprised himself when he froze in his tracks, looked into her stricken face as she approached him, and said the first words that popped into his head.

"Fitz, I-"

"Coulson wants to talk to you."

He supposed it hadn't really come out harshly, but they weren't the words he'd meant to say and his timing was bloody awful and there was also the issue that his words prevented any of what he'd wanted in that moment.

Jemma paused a few feet in front of him, looking somewhat deflated as her arms fell to her sides. "Oh," she said in a high voice, her cheeks inexplicably turning pink. "Right." A small laugh escaped her lips, but her face was twisted in a nervous grimace. "I suppose I'm in a bit of trouble, aren't I?"

Before Fitz could answer, Ward emerged from his bunk and made his way over to the two of them. Fitz was mildly (or not so mildly) perturbed that the guy showed absolutely no visible signs of having just spent an hour and half treading water in the middle of the sea. "It'll be fine," he assured Jemma. "Just let him rant and don't try and interrupt him. It'll make your life easier, trust me."

Jemma glanced anxiously up the spiral staircase. "'Course," she murmured, giving Fitz a wincing smile before she followed Ward to Coulson's office.

Later, when she found him in his bunk, he wrung a pillow in his hands so he'd have something to do with them. It helped a bit, if nothing else than to keep the panic at bay as he continued to avoid her gaze. He was acutely aware of where she was in relation to him. How she continually tried to talk over his ramblings. How her hands hovered just above his shoulder while he spoke. As if by some stretch of the imagination she too had to force herself from clinging onto him.

Hours after she'd left, Fitz continued to wring the pillow in his hands, trying not to think about how dangerously close he'd come to losing her that day. He replayed her words in his head and focused on the memory of her lips on his cheek, to keep himself convinced that it was over, that she was alive, that he didn't have to worry anymore.

But all he could see when he closed his eyes was the fall.

She'd called him a hero, hadn't she? Because of what he'd done in the lab? Because he'd helped her do something that she was perfectly capable of doing herself? Because he'd stood behind the glass doors helplessly, completely incapable of catching her when she'd fallen? It was a nice sentiment, he supposed, for Jemma to call him a hero.

If only he could believe her.


	3. Between Seeds and T.R.A.C.K.S.

Fitz quickly sidestepped over on the path to avoid colliding with a uniformed gentleman, who was moving much faster than could be considered reasonable. He glanced around the quad, feeling out of place in his bright red button-down shirt and tie, as well as by the fact that he seemed to be a good six inches shorter than anyone in the immediate vicinity. He thought maybe he was just being paranoid, since it also felt like everyone they passed was looking at him.

But they weren't really looking at  _him_ , were they?

The agent in front of him, who'd strangely elected to wear a simple white tee shirt that he only partially tucked into his jeans (was that supposed to be cool or something?), commanded the attention of most of the cadets that looked their way. But Fitz also noticed that despite the wide eyes and whispers behind hands, no one ever actually spoke to them. It was kind of eerie in a way, how the throngs of students instinctively made a pathway for him out of respect for the legend but never once followed through on a desire to approach him.

Then again, Fitz supposed Ward's Academy life hadn't been all that social.

Ward looked over his shoulder and gave Fitz a wry smirk. "So," he said in a voice that was a bit too smug. "Is Operations what you expected?"

Fitz didn't smile. "To the letter."

Just then, he had to nearly jump out of the way for another hurried individual. "Where's the bloody fire?" he muttered, more than a little offended that he couldn't walk peacefully on the designated pathway. "What's with all the running?"

"You see, Fitz," Ward replied gravely as he used his hands to gesture around the quad, where there appeared to be death traps made out of rope and a stretch of barbed wire that people were voluntarily throwing themselves under. "There are people that follow something called a personal exercise regimen, where-"

"I'm  _well aware of that_ , Ward," Fitz hissed in annoyance. "I just don't understand why it's so important that you have to be hurrying about every damn second. And where  _some_  people are trying to walk, no less. It's ridiculous, is what it is."

Ward simply shook his head, but he had that infuriating smirk on his face again.

They appeared to be heading towards a bleak-looking building. Fitz had never actually been to the Academy of Operations (despite its relatively short distance from SciTech), so he still wasn't really sure where they were going. "What are we even doing here anyway?" he asked, repressing a scoff as a group of giggling girls swarmed past them, most of which didn't even bother to pretend they weren't ogling at Ward. "I thought we were supposed to be finding Quinn."

Ward scanned his visitor pass at the door of the building and held it open for Fitz. "Skye's monitoring his activity right now," he explained while he led them down a nondescript white corridor. "Checking for any big purchases, tracking invoices from his shell companies, basically trying to figure out what his next move is. But every time we've gone up against Quinn, things haven't exactly gone as planned. Which is why we need to be prepared for whatever happens." They reached a pair of sliding doors and Ward raised an eyebrow at Fitz as they passed through them. "Who knows? We might even get to go undercover."

"Fantastic," Fitz muttered sarcastically. "Still haven't answered my question, though."

But Ward didn't get a chance to respond, because the space opened up to reveal the largest indoor firing range Fitz had ever seen in his life. Which resolved the mystery of where Ward had been taking him but still didn't explain to Fitz why they were there in the first place. Before Fitz knew what was happening, Ward was handing him a pair of noise-cancelling headphones and an unloaded pistol.

"Welcome to target practice," Ward said by way of introduction, as if through that simple phrase he'd managed to reveal everything (which he most certainly hadn't). "Operations style."

Fitz stared at the gun for a few seconds before gingerly taking it in his grasp. " _Okay_ ," he replied slowly, as if talking to a small child. "So why are we here exactly?"

Ward's grin disappeared. He didn't sigh so much as breathe out a bit more forcefully through his nose. "The only way that you're going to get better," he explained with obviously forced patience, "is if you work on your weaknesses." His expression softened as he clapped Fitz on the shoulder. "Besides, it'll be fun."

Fitz was having trouble processing a lot of what Ward had said (mostly the fact that he'd used the word "fun" unironically), but the specialist was already making his way towards one of the many empty spaces in the room. Fitz began following a few steps behind. The range itself was fairly empty, so Fitz didn't mind the noise as much as he would've expected. But when it came to semi-automatic weapons, he actually much preferred building the guns as opposed to actually using them.

Not that he would ever tell Ward that.

"You  _do_  know I've actually… _designed_  firearms, yeah?" he asked once they'd reached a station.

"I know," Ward assured him as he meticulously arranged the magazines on the ledge in front of him. "And  _no one_  is saying that that is not impressive, okay? I mean, aside from the-"

"I swear if you say one more word about the bloody ounce, I'll-"

"My  _point_ ," Ward spoke loudly over him, sounding a tad too condescending for Fitz's comfort. "Is that there's a big difference between designing weapons in a lab…" He paused for supposed effect, pointing towards the targets at the opposite side of the range. "And being able to pull the trigger when you're under pressure."

"Oh, and you don't think I'm capable of doing that, is that it?"

Ward started to shake his head. "That's not what I-"

"Because I don't know if you remember Ossetia, but I  _clearly_ -"

"Was trying to say, if you'd just-"

"Saved both of our hides multiple times-"

"And I'm not saying you didn't," Ward insisted, raising his voice again. Fitz had his mouth open to continue arguing, but Ward powered forward before he could get another word in. "Look, all I'm saying is that every field agent needs practice, okay? It's nothing to be ashamed of, Fitz."

Fitz was so confused at this point that he actually couldn't think of anything to say in response. Ward must have taken his silence as some kind of acceptance, because he slid a magazine in front of him and pointed to the target at the end of the range. "Come on, let's just see where you are now, and we'll go from there." He rested his headphones over his ears and crossed his arms. "Take your time."

There were so many alarming things Fitz wanted to address, but he figured perhaps the best way to address them would be to just get on with it. So instead of protesting again, Fitz simply slid his own headphones on, clicked the magazine into place, disengaged the slide lock, and fired once.

The sound of the shot had been muffled, but it still rang in Fitz's ears as he lowered the pistol and glanced over at Ward. For his part, Ward had removed his headphones and was squinting at the target down the range, his brow creased in confusion. He looked back and forth between Fitz and the target, placing one hand on his chin. After a long pause, he met Fitz's eyes. "Do it again."

Fitz nearly threw his arms up in exasperation, but this time he didn't even bother arguing. Without covering his ears again, he fired once more at the target.

Ward's pause was shorter this time. "Again."

The shot resounded loudly throughout the room, though Fitz was so irritated with Ward that he barely minded the noise. He expected the specialist to repeat the strange orders (to which Fitz would've had some very choice words), but Ward was busy inspecting the target. He pressed a button in the wall, and the cutout slid forward to show the points of impact.

All three bullets had pierced the center.

Fitz didn't even try to keep the proud grin off his face, or hide his amusement at Ward's bewildered expression. After a few seconds, Ward folded his arms again and narrowed his eyes at Fitz. "You didn't fail the marksmanship portion of your field assessment, did you?" he asked in a voice that suggested he already knew the answer.

Fitz's jaw went slack. "Where the bloody hell did you get that idea?"

Ward simply pulled his phone out of his back pocket and swiped the screen a few times. He held it out for Fitz to see the display, which showed some sort of document or other. An alarm bell went off in his head when he saw his name at the top.

"Did you and Simmons take your assessments together?"

"The same day, yeah," Fitz murmured, still trying to read the small print on the screen. "Why?"

Ward sighed. "And they gave you the results verbally, didn't they?"

Fitz tried to take the phone from Ward. "Where did you get this?"

"That's…that's not important," Ward said dismissively, pocketing his phone again. "What's important is that we're not focusing on what we should be right now."

Something clicked in Fitz's head, although in the back of his mind he was still more than a little concerned about the document on Ward's phone. "Ward," he said, drawing out each word carefully. "Are you saying that S.H.I.E.L.D. switched my assessment record with Simmons?"

But Ward was shaking his head as he looked off into the distance. "You know, it makes  _so_  much more sense now," he marveled, sounding like he was talking to himself. "I always thought Simmons had swimmers legs and I just couldn't figure out how she managed to fail that part of the test."

Fitz scoffed. "We all have different ways of staying afloat, Ward," he replied defensively. "And who's to say any of them is the  _right_  way, okay? Some of us manage not to drown just fine, thank you very much, that whole bit of the test was all subjective anyway, and…wait, hang on." He held up a hand as he processed something else Ward had said. "What in God's name are swimmers legs?"

Ward didn't seem to be paying much attention to him, though, gathering up their things and resetting the station. "Come on," he said as he motioned for Fitz to follow him. "We've still got some time to head over to the pool."

Fitz didn't move. "I'm not going swimming with you, Ward."

Even though he was facing the other way, Fitz could still see Ward's thinning patience before he spun around and sighed. "The only way you'll be prepared for-"

But his voice was cut off by the sound of buzzing coming from both of their pockets. Fitz held up his own mobile. "Oh, would you look at that?" he asked with mock disappointment. "Coulson needs us back at the Bus. How sad. We'll have to postpone this riveting adventure for another time, perhaps…never."

Ward shook his head again as they headed for the exit, although Fitz thought he saw the edges of his lips curling upwards. "You know, one day you might wish you'd learned the proper technique."

"Not today," Fitz muttered.

It was funny, in a way, when he thought about it later. Not funny like he was going to start laughing or anything. More the kind of funny that twists a knife in your gut and tells you that you should've seen it coming. The kind of funny that he'd been right, at least in part. The kind of funny that Ward had been right too, that they hadn't been prepared to go up against Quinn. That day Fitz  _hadn't_  had to worry about things like correct swimming techniques or trying not to drown.

But he'd had plenty of other things to worry about.

He couldn't really pinpoint the moment he'd known something was very, very wrong. Perhaps it was when they'd lost communications with May. Perhaps it was during the ten interminable seconds that he'd stopped breathing, the time in between when Jemma had taken the grenade on the train and when he'd figured out she was still alive. Perhaps it was when he'd seen the blue tendrils on her small face, freezing her in time. Perhaps it was when his stomach had churned at the thought of leaving her alone, unconscious and vulnerable, while he and Skye had taken it upon themselves to go after Quinn. Perhaps it was when he'd given Skye the Night-Night gun, knowing fully well that she shouldn't go in by herself. Perhaps it was when the guard's body had hit the ground, mere inches from his face.

Or perhaps it was the sound of the gunshots. Not the sound of dendrotoxin being fired. Not the sound of something anyone could wake up from. Too close. Too loud. Too unstoppable.

Fitz couldn't have said when exactly it had all gone wrong. But as he stared at Skye's unmoving form, the blood spreading throughout her blouse, the hyperbaric chamber barely sustaining her, he felt the hollow pit in his stomach that told him the truth. That this.

Should not.

Have happened.

Why hadn't he gone in with her? How the bloody hell did he think telling her to be careful would protect her? For God's sake, she wasn't even a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent.  _He_  was. Not a field agent perhaps, but an agent nonetheless. And he'd let her go in alone.  _Alone_. Sure, there wouldn't have been much he could've done to stop a bullet. But he could've done  _something_. He could've been there. He could've provided a distraction, or pushed her out of the way, or taken the damn bullet himself if it had come down to it. Instead he'd hid under the car with his gadgets, thinking that he was actually being useful.

How useful had those disabled cars been when the bullets had pierced her body?

And all because he'd been a coward.

It was like a strange sense of déjà vu, sitting on the couch in that horrendous waiting room. He felt like he was four years old again. The same fear coursing through his veins, the same agony of failing to understand what was happening, helpless to stop a bullet he hadn't even known was coming.

Even Jemma couldn't erase his guilt, no matter how hard she'd tried to comfort him. Perhaps it was because as much as he wanted to believe her words, he knew they were a lie. He'd held her back on the Bus as she'd broken down, knowing that she blamed herself too: for not being there, for not having the ability to do more, for failing to fix the problem. For failing to fix  _his_  mistake.

No, as much as he appreciated the gesture, Jemma's presence only served as a reminder that this wasn't the first time he'd failed to protect the people that meant the most to him.

" _We're_  her family," Coulson told the doctor, when they'd discovered it was too late.

And it was true. Skye  _had_  become a part of his family, even if it'd taken Fitz much too long to realize it. It was just another knife to his gut, really, piled on top of every other reason why he'd fallen short that day.

Because after all, Fitz had never really been good at taking care of his family, had he?


	4. Between Beginning of the End and Shadows

The notion of madness had always been a strange one for Fitz.

After all, the word encompassed a concept that was intangible in practicality, a disorder of the mind rather than the body, a miscommunication of synapses that failed to affect two people in the exact same way. Was it something that happened all at once, like some cruel omniscient being had flipped a switch somewhere? Or was it something that happened over time, a gradual process, until the line between reality and fantasy could no longer be determined? Until everything you'd ever known (or thought you'd known) slipped through the cracks of your mind as easily as water through the spaces between your fingers?

Whatever the case, there was really only one thing that Leopold Fitz was absolutely certain of.

He was losing his mind.

Not that he could have said when it had happened exactly. Maybe he'd known from the second he'd woken up in that hospital bed, decidedly  _not_  dead, her radiant smile in front of him contradicted by the bags under her eyes and the tears threatening to spill over and the alarming fact _that_   _he was not dead_.

Or maybe it'd taken him a few minutes to figure it out, as he'd sifted through the jumbled information in his head and failed to make sense of the calculations he'd always been able to see so clearly. Maybe he'd known when he'd tried to speak but couldn't find the words. Maybe he'd known when he'd actually found the words but couldn't bring himself to say them. Maybe he'd known when he'd seen Jemma's tears finally escape down her pale cheeks, as she'd realized that perhaps it would've been better if she'd just left him down at the bottom of the bloody sea like he'd told her to.

Or maybe he hadn't  _really_  known for a bit longer. Maybe he'd figured it out sometime during the agony of those first couple of months, as he'd attempted to reintegrate himself into his former self and discovered that he couldn't. Maybe it was the blasted shake in his hands, his once trustworthy and steady hands, or maybe it was the way he couldn't form a damn sentence anymore, or maybe it was the way everyone was looking at him now. Not like he was a hero. Not like he'd done something brave in trying to give up his life for Jemma. Like he was fragile. Weak. Functionally useless (but apparently pitiable enough to let him stay).

Maybe he'd already lost it, though. He'd always had a habit of talking to himself, hadn't he? (Just not like this.) Aside from his mum, Fitz had mostly kept to himself growing up, finding that no one else could really understand him or how he saw the world. (Until her.) Talking to himself had been a natural extension of his solitude then, a way to help him think through his work or perhaps to fill the void of silence when he was alone. (Just not like this.)

And he'd always seen things others couldn't, right? How things worked precisely? The way science and mathematics merged together to create the world around him? Angles and speeds and trajectories and force and everything that he'd once thought was beautiful but now warped themselves into something repulsive as they stumbled and stuttered out of his mouth. Even before, when he'd been able to trust his mind, he'd seen things a bit differently than anyone else could. ( _Just not like this_.)

No, maybe the seeds of madness had always been in his head. And they'd just needed a little bit of water to grow.

Deep down, he knew she wasn't really there. He saw the way people looked at him when he talked to her, their faces filled not with the admiration or confusion usually expressed from outsiders to his conversations with her. These expressions were ones of sorrow. Embarrassment.

Pity.

There were other clues too. The way she was dressed, in a jumper that she'd set flame to along with the rest of the clothes she'd been wearing the day she'd contracted the Chitauri virus. (Antiserum or no antiserum, she'd sworn that she'd never get the smell of salt water out of them. Fitz hadn't argued with her, even though he'd known the real truth, that she just couldn't bring herself to wear them ever again.) The way no one else directly spoke to her. The way she didn't tiptoe around him, or hide things from him, or argue with him (at least not the way  _she_  would now). The way she was just so...before. Before he'd told her what he shouldn't have. Before S.H.I.E.L.D. had disintegrated. Before Ward and HYDRA and that mess at the Hub. Before she'd jumped. Before his entire world had been turned upside down.

And that was just it, wasn't it? Things weren't like how they'd been before. Things could never be like they'd been before.

So she could never be either.

But perhaps his biggest clue was that he remembered in perfect detail every single thing that had happened the day she'd left.

He'd been in the lab, of course (the new lab, though, not theirs), sketching preliminary blueprints for the Bus. He hadn't made too much headway on the cloaking technology since Coulson had asked him, there were too many variables that he was still trying to sift through, but despite his frustration it felt nice to finally be working on something again. True, the quality of his drawings had suffered a bit (or more than a bit) from his accident, and sometimes he felt the need to throw something when he saw the pity in her eyes (or was it something else?) as she tried to help him. But as much as it pained him that he was light-years away from getting back to how he used to be, and as much as being around her made him feel woefully inadequate, he knew it was her faith in him that had gotten him as far as he was.

Because after all, she'd had enough faith in him to drag his unconscious body up ninety feet of water on the off chance that he would make it…Hadn't she?

Maybe that was why it'd come as such a shock.

He hadn't heard her come into the lab that day, or approach him from behind. He supposed that that was just one of the infinite number of things that had changed. He'd always been subconsciously in-tuned to her presence. Not in a weird way or anything. Just in a way that meant he didn't even have to look to know she was there. She'd become an instinct for him over the years, as much of an instinct as his instinct to breathe or his instinct to jump at loud noises. It seemed that no matter where his focus was or what was happening, he was always aware of where she was in relation to him, like an extension of his own body.

Things were different now. Now he had to pour all of his focus into things that had once come so naturally to him. It wasn't much of a surprise to him that that included her.

But her hand on his shoulder was still unmistakable. (At least there were some things that hadn't changed.)

"Fitz?" he heard her say softly. She sounded almost hesitant.

Fitz abandoned his sketchbook on the lab bench and turned his head to look at her. He didn't want her to think he was bothered by the interruption, despite the fact that his task was irritating him to no end. He tried to give her a smile, but it froze on his face as he saw her expression. "J…Jemma?" he asked, reaching up to rest his hand on hers. He searched her eyes in an attempt to figure out what was wrong, but he couldn't read her anymore. He didn't know what she was thinking.

But something was most certainly wrong.

"Hey, Fitz," she repeated with a small smile, though her eyes (God, her eyes) betrayed her and only served to further increase Fitz's sudden panic. "I just wanted to tell you that I'm…" He held his breath, waiting for her to finish, and tried not to press her hand into his shoulder too tightly. The seconds ticked by to the point where she looked nearly uncomfortable. "I'm…I'm taking a little trip," she finally stammered, gently but firmly slipping her hand out from under his grasp.

Fitz lamented the loss of her fingertips on his shoulder, but her words were the most concerning part for him. They twisted and tumbled around in his head, trying to arrange themselves in a way that made some modicum of sense. (They didn't.)

Jemma must have seen his confusion because the rest of her words spilled out in a rush. "I'm going to see my mum and dad. I haven't seen them for ages." She was smiling but it was wrong and the words were wrong and everything was wrong. "I just need to go, you know?"

Fitz's brain was in full panic mode now, but he knew he needed to say something. Anything. Ask why she wanted to leave (or why she was lying to him). Ask her what Coulson had said, or how he was supposed to run the lab without her, or why she was lying to him, or how on earth she expected him to get better if she left, or how long she was going to be gone, or  _why_   _she was lying to him_. But there was only one word that escaped the tumultuous storm in his mind.

"When?"

His vision had blurred a little, though he could still see Jemma fighting back her own tears. It didn't calm him down, nor did her answer. "Tomorrow," she said, her voice catching briefly. She gave him a smile again, but it looked more like a wince and once again did nothing for Fitz's panic. "I just wanted to say goodbye…before I left."

Fitz simply stared at her, finding himself unable to speak. There were so many things she was saying that he wanted to latch onto, to question, but his mind was swirling and tomorrow was so soon and she was so damn stubborn and he  _couldn't bloody focus_   _on the words_  that staring dumbly was all he could manage. She held his gaze for a few moments (but God, they weren't long enough), before she stepped forward and pressed her lips to his cheek, so softly and so quickly that he wasn't sure if he'd just imagined it or not.

And then, just like that…she was gone.

He spent the rest of the day in the lab. Not doing anything productive, of course. In fact, time became practically irrelevant to him as her words continued to play themselves over and over again in his head. No matter how many times they repeated, though, and no matter how many times he tried to find something to focus on, the panic continued to grow in his chest as all of his questions ended with a resounding  _what the bloody hell was he going to do_?

Sometime that night, after everyone else had gone to sleep and his palms had started bleeding from gripping the lab bench too tightly, he made the impulsive decision to find her and at least try to get some answers. Whether or not he could find the words to voice his concerns was another thing entirely, but it turned out it didn't matter. Because by the time he reached her bunk, her new bunk at the Playground that neither of them had quite gotten used to yet, it was already empty. No framed photographs adorning the nightstand. No jumpers hanging in the open wardrobe. No sign at all that she'd been there, that day or otherwise, save for the faint scent of lavender lingering throughout the vacant space (although Fitz felt like that part could've been in his head).

Like she'd never been there at all.

So she really  _was_  gone.

Somehow, the truth of it wasn't something Fitz could immediately process.

He stayed in that room for a while, although he couldn't have said how long he stayed there exactly. At one point, he found himself sitting on the floor in the corner of the room, clutching onto the pillow she'd left behind (not her favorite pillow, just the standard ones Coulson had bought in bulk for the base). He didn't cry, didn't make any sound at all, really. He simply wrung the life out of the pillow until he couldn't feel his shaking fingers anymore, and then buried his face in the material. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew he wasn't getting enough oxygen, that he needed to breathe, but some other part of him - some sick, twisted part – told him that it couldn't mess him up anymore than he already was. And if it did, well…maybe the apple didn't really fall far from the tree…

He was jolted out of his dark thoughts by the sound of hurried footsteps in the corridor. There was really no way for him to escape the room unnoticed, but he stood up quickly to prepare himself for whatever was coming. He knew it wasn't her, that it couldn't be her, this girl was dragging her feet too much to be her. But his heart still plummeted when the door slammed open and she wasn't the one standing in the doorway with tear-stained cheeks.

"Oh, God," Skye choked out before crossing the room. "Fitz."

Fitz was still in a state of shock, so he barely registered her arms around him or the muffled sobs against his shoulder. There was a brief moment, a couple seconds really, where he allowed himself to relax into the embrace and let out a few of his own tears. But there was something wrong about the contact and his hands were shaking again and he was finding it difficult to breathe, so he took a step backward and tried to angle himself so he was closer to the door.

"I have to, uh…" he mumbled, looking everywhere but directly at Skye. "There's something I've got to…cl-cloaking, it's, erm…yeah."

He raced off down the corridor before she could say anything, although despite the buzzing sound in his ears he somehow still managed to hear her whisper his name. He thought about heading back to the lab, entertaining the absurd notion that he could actually get some work done on the cloaking in his current frame of mind, but he knew that'd be the first place Skye or Coulson or Trip would look for him. Instead he mindlessly grabbed his sketchpad and a few pencils and made a beeline for the Playground's hangar.

It wasn't until he walked through the gaping hole in the cargo hold that he remembered why he and Jemma didn't work in the Bus's lab anymore. Since they'd made camp at the base, they'd moved a lot of their equipment into the new space, despite Fitz's grumblings that they wouldn't have to deal with so many people if they just worked in their old lab. But since Garrett had demolished the sliding doors and Coulson hadn't had the resources to replace them immediately, Jemma had insisted on the move in the name of safety precaution.

Now, as he stood in the place they'd once seamlessly worked together, Fitz realized that his choice of a hiding spot was actually much, much worse than Jemma's bunk.

He shook his head, quickly speeding up the spiral staircase into the common area. He didn't suppose there was any spot on the Bus that was untainted by his memories of her, but he figured Coulson's mobile office would be the safest option. He didn't sit in the boss's chair or anything, simply found a corner to sit in. His sketchpad lay tossed aside, as useless in that moment as he was.

As soon as he stopped moving, the thoughts came back to hit him at full force.

She'd said she was going to see her parents. Her  _parents_. Knowing fully well that he wouldn't want to go with her, that the visit would just make him feel more inadequate than he already did, that it would spark questions about visiting his own mother and why he absolutely could  _not_  go through with that. She  _knew_  he couldn't talk to his mum, couldn't show her how broken he was, couldn't stand to see the pain in her eyes at his condition, couldn't do more than send her a quick email assuring her of his safety using an encrypted account Skye had set up. Jemma  _knew_ that. And yet she'd told him she was going back to England anyway.

But she'd lied, hadn't she? She wasn't really going to see her parents. Or perhaps she'd been truthful about that part, and she'd simply lied about why she'd wanted to go. Fitz didn't have to be a rocket scientist (or a former one) to figure that bit out. (It'd been him, right? What he'd said to her? The way he was now? The fact that he couldn't keep up with her anymore? The fact that maybe she should've  _done what he'd bloody told her to and left him down in the pod_?) He wasn't quite sure which uncertainty haunted him more: why she'd left, or where she'd gone.

Because if she'd lied to him about visiting her parents…then where was she actually going?

That thought, that unanswered question, those innumerably distressing possibilities, terrified him more than he thought was feasible.

After that, Fitz didn't really pay attention to the days anymore. They all blended together anyway, to the point where he wasn't sure how many weeks or months had actually passed. In the beginning, Skye and Trip had done their best to engage him, with drinks or a movie marathon or some other such nonsense that he could never really enjoy with the cloaking pressures in the back of his mind. But then Skye started training more vigorously for her work in the field, and they both started departing on more and more missions to make up for S.H.I.E.L.D.'s shortened staff, and the Playground started filling up with more and more agents as Coulson continued his steady recruitment process. It didn't take long for their get-togethers to decrease in frequency, or for them to disappear altogether.

But perhaps that was for the best. It got rid of any preconceived notions the former team had that he would ever be the same again. And it made it easier for Fitz to avoid having to try so damn hard all the time. At least when he kept to himself he didn't have to worry about finding the words.

(It was around that time that  _she_  showed up. Fitz found himself increasingly thankful that mostly everyone left him alone. He wasn't sure he was quite ready to answer those questions just yet.)

He developed an easy routine, spending the majority of the day in the lab tinkering with the little he'd managed to develop on the cloaking technology, while his nights were spent either lying awake in his bunk as he attempted to get a few hours of fitful sleep or wandering around the base's empty hallways.

Truthfully, Fitz found that he actually didn't mind working in the old lab, as time went on. There was something about the familiarity that made him feel like there was a real chance he could solve the cloaking conundrum. And…okay,  _she_  was almost always guaranteed to come talk to him when the absence of her counterpart was more pronounced. That part, that pathetic reality, was not lost on him. Somehow, he just couldn't bring himself to care.

He  _did_  have to be careful about the time he spent in there, though. During the day, the entire hangar was usually swarming with agents, arriving or leaving for missions, refueling, or tending to the vehicles. Coulson had recruited a few mechanics to outfit more S.H.I.E.L.D. SUVs and whatnot. Which would've been a neat idea if the director hadn't also decided to turn the Bus's cargo hold into a garage, or if one of those mechanics didn't prefer working on the cars until the small hours of the morning.

Those first couple nights, Fitz discovered the optimal time he could be alone on the Bus through simple trial and error. He already knew the hours around midnight were off-limits, as were the few leading up to sunrise (Fitz  _thought_  he'd scurried away before May or Skye had seen him, since they'd seemed to be pretty engrossed with trying to knock each other out, but he wasn't so sure). On the third or fourth night, he was almost certain that two o'clock would be a winner.

But as he entered the hangar and approached the Bus, he realized that someone else had had the same idea.

His legs were ready to bolt again, though he knew Trip had already seen him.

"Hey, man," Trip grinned, dropping down from the pull-up bar and taking out his headphones. "What're you still doing up?"

"Uh…I, er…" Fitz stuttered as he wracked his brain for a plausible explanation. "J...I, um…I could ask you the same thing."

Fitz could have smacked himself, but thankfully Trip took his ridiculous response in stride. "Coulson's still working on fixing up the old fitness center," he explained, reaching over to drain about half of a water bottle. "So cargo hold it is for now."

"Yeah, but it's still two in the morning, though."

Trip smiled. "Yes, it is," he laughed before gesturing around the empty hangar. "And look at that, Fitz. No one around to mess with me when I'm in my zone."

And that was Fitz's cue to leave. "Right, then," he muttered, scratching the back of his head as he tried to shuffle awkwardly away. "I'll just, uh…"

Trip let out another laugh. "Nah, man, I'm just playing with you. Trust me, I don't mind the company." His expression faltered somewhat as he sighed and pointed to some of the equipment off to the side, like he'd just remembered they were there. "Hey, listen. I brought out some extra weights and stuff, if you wanna-"

"Oh, no, no, that's, um…" Fitz knew he was going to spiral, but he had to find a way out of there. "Well, i-it's just I've got to…and then  _you_ …and just, er…I don't think it's…and then, of course, it's…" He snapped his fingers quietly, trying not to groan with frustration. "Tired," he said finally. "Yeah, I'm just, uh…just tired. So…"

"All right, Fitz," Trip replied, holding up his hands to show he was backing off. His smile didn't quite reach his eyes, though. "Another time, maybe."

"Yeah," Fitz mumbled as he darted out of the hold. "Another time."

He knew before he'd walked five paces what she was going to say. "You know, he was just trying to be friendly, Fitz. Would it have really been so bad if you'd joined him?"

"Oh, so I could make a bloody fool of myself, you mean?"

"No!" she protested. "I just meant-"

"You've seen the guy, he could probably bench press Lola if he put his mind to it-"

She stepped in front of him so he would stop in his tracks, which was a bit ridiculous since she wasn't really there. "Fitz," she said more gently, placing her hand on his shoulder. "How long are you going to keep pushing away the people that are trying so hard to reach out to you?"

Out of instinct, he reached his hand up to hold onto hers. But at the last second he shrugged out of her grasp. He couldn't quite look her in the eye. "It's, um…I'm not the Fitz they're reaching out to."

She was persistent, though. "You don't know that," she said as she stepped closer to him. "If you'd just give them a chance-"

"Could you just leave me alone right now, Simmons?" he asked, closing his eyes tightly to keep from lashing out in the middle of an empty corridor. "Please."

She didn't say anything in response, didn't touch him either. And when he opened his eyes again…she was gone.

As he headed back to his bunk for another sleepless night, he couldn't help but recognize the dark irony of it all. How all he'd had to do was ask her to leave, and she'd left. Wasn't that what he'd done before, down at the bottom of the sea? He'd asked her to leave, hadn't he? He'd asked her to leave without him.

And she had, in the end.

Fitz just hadn't thought he'd have to live with the outcome.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for the rather bleak nature of this chapter. Hopefully the final two chapters will contain a bit more light-heartedness.
> 
> I'd also like to formally thank madalayna for letting me use some of her work. The scene in which Simmons leaves is actually borrowed a bit from her story Countermeasures (chapter 3). The story itself, while amazing (you should totally check it out), has no relation to this one. However, she wrote a bit of a flashback of Simmons leaving from Simmons's perspective, and it broke my heart in such a way that I wanted to include that part, only from Fitz's perspective. Thank you, darlin!
> 
> As always, thank you so much for reading, and honest feedback is always appreciated! :)


	5. Aftershocks

Silent flights on the Bus were nothing new to Fitz, not by a long shot.

After all, he'd endured plenty of the awkwardly silent flights, like the time they'd discovered that Skye had gone behind their backs with her Rising Tide ex-boyfriend. Fitz and Jemma had quietly remained in the comm room during that agonizingly long trip to China, decidedly avoiding the Cage and the possibility of making eye contact with Coulson or Ward or the two hackers being contained inside.

Then there were those intensely nerve-wracking flights, the ones where words seemed redundant, where the black hole of panic threatened to swallow the team and the Bus and any ounce of hope they'd had of making it in time. (In time to get Jemma and Ward out of the Atlantic. In time to save Skye after Ian Quinn had shot her. In time to rescue Jemma at the Hub before HYDRA could do its worst.) Those flights were torture, a different kind of oxygen deprivation than the kind Fitz had experienced at the bottom of the sea.

He supposed it came with the territory of living on a plane. As with any other living quarters, there were bound to be moments in which everyone needed their own space, when the company of others became almost like a burden, when tensions were high or nerves were fried or the aircraft just wasn't large enough for all of them to peaceably coexist. Fitz hadn't really expected anything less when he and Jemma had come aboard Coulson's mobile command station what felt like a lifetime ago.

But this flight wasn't quite like the others.

This time, there were no words to say or orders to give. There were no destinations to hurtle towards, no clock to race against, no villain to defeat, no help to call. It was over. They'd lost. The obelisk had gone off and the temple had collapsed and Trip was dead.

Dead.

No GH serum to regenerate his cells. No hyperbaric chamber to sustain him in until they reached a hospital. No cybernetic enhancements to piece him back together again. Dead. Just like that. And all because he'd had to be so damn heroic.

The self-sacrificing bastard.

Not that Fitz could blame Trip or anything. He'd gone down into the tunnels to save Skye, and had just happened to find himself in the worst possible place at the worst possible time. Incidentally, there were moments in which Fitz didn't know whether to be angry with Trip for doing something incredibly stupid and getting himself killed, or to be angry with himself for not doing everything in his power to stop him. It was a vicious internal argument, especially when Fitz considered what might have happened if Trip  _hadn't_  gone down there.

Try as he might, Fitz couldn't erase the image of Trip's frozen face amongst the rubble of the destroyed temple from his memory, nor could he erase the morbid images his mind conjured up of the possibility of Skye in his place. And even though a part of Fitz was more than a little relieved that Skye had survived, the rational side of him knew that she'd been astronomically lucky. In fact, if he was honest with himself, the entire thing didn't seem to add up…

Fitz shook his head, clearing away his irrelevant thoughts. It didn't matter. Trip was dead, and there was nothing he or anyone else could do about it. All they could do was try to move past it, to keep going, and to ensure that no one else went near that damned temple ever again.

Out of habit, Fitz's gaze fell upon Jemma's open bunk as he paced back and forth in the silent common area. The bunk was empty, which was hardly surprising. She barely spent time in there anymore, now that they were more or less permanently stationed at the Playground. And then, of course, she wasn't even on the Bus right now.

Fitz didn't know why, in that precise moment, he missed her so badly. Well…okay, he knew exactly why. He just didn't understand how he could miss her so badly, when he himself had been the one so bloody persistent upon leaving her in San Juan to finish assessing the tunnels on her own.

It wasn't that he hadn't  _wanted_  to stay. Far from it, actually. In fact, if Jemma had asked him before they'd seen the wreckage, he might have forgotten all of his protestations and agreed. The memory of her warmth as their arms had found each other during the earthquake (an impulse driven by years of them being together and ignorant of all the reasons why they shouldn't be). The hope still burrowing a small hole in his chest after they'd begun to complete each other's sentences again. The promise of the possibility of him eating his own words (and gleefully doing so) as he continued to get better and eventually joined Jemma as co-chair of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s science division. It would've been damn near impossible for him to look her in the eye and tell her he was leaving.

But that had been before Fitz had seen Trip's body. (Or, rather, all that'd remained of it.)

It hadn't taken long for the initial shock to give way to a kind of placid numbness. But the shock was enough to erase any kind of fantasy Fitz had had of things returning to normal.

And the bubble of false reality had been burst. Trip was dead. Skye had barely made it herself. Fitz wasn't getting better. Jemma, practically a stranger to him now, still treated him like he was a fragile, hollow version of the person he used to be. Everything was different, yet nothing had changed. It was ignorant and, frankly, downright foolish to pretend otherwise.

He hadn't been able to look directly at her afterwards, the raw pain in her eyes and the tremor in her voice betraying her calm and collected façade. Fitz couldn't look at her, because then she would know that he knew, and then she would see that he wasn't okay either, and then something might have happened that would've most likely led to the crumbling of his already flimsy resolve.

"Please, Fitz. I could really use your help."

Her pleadings had been soft, not that it'd mattered. Fitz had felt the volume of each word pounding alongside his heartbeat, drowning out everything else. And God, the tiny hitch when she'd said his name. It'd nearly sent him over the edge of reason.

He couldn't stay, though. That much had been certain. He was useless to her there, and he hardly needed the thick, heavy air or the musty remnants of that cursed city to remind him of that. So he hadn't been able to look her in the eyes. Instead, he'd chosen to focus on her right cheekbone, slightly pink from the exertion of being in the tunnels. The color might have also been something else, some repressed display of emotion that Fitz had figured she'd hold in until she was alone. Or maybe she'd been going to let it out right then, at the base of the tunnels' entrance, just as the cavern had mostly cleared out and just as Fitz had been so desperately trying to leave.

"Jemma," he'd protested quietly, shaking his head for both her sake and his. "You've got a whole team of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents at your command. I'm sure they'll be able to help you much more than I can." He'd gestured towards the tunnels. "Besides, none of my stuff is gonna work down there anyway, remember? No, er…no electronics and all that."

Her exasperated sigh might have annoyed him, if the circumstances had been different and if it hadn't also sounded like a muffled sob. "I'm not talking about your  _gadgets_ , Fitz," she'd explained. "I'm  _saying_  that I'd really feel much better about all this if y-"

Fitz had interrupted her. "You'll do fine, Jemma." And then, partly because he'd been grasping at straws and partly because it'd been true, he'd added, "Coulson trusts you."

"That's not what I meant. I just-"

But this had been an argument Fitz couldn't afford to lose. "Look, I'll, um…I'll keep an eye on Skye, all right? Coulson wants to get her back to the Playground, make sure she's okay. Mack got cleared, seems fine since he wasn't directly hit, but-"

Jemma had just nodded, like she'd followed his train of thought and knew he was right. "We want to be certain Skye wasn't adversely affected by whatever gaseous substance was released from the obelisk."

"Right," he'd muttered. "You already knew that."

In his mind's eye, Fitz had remembered her face, hurt but stubborn, when she'd asked him why he was moving to the garage. He hadn't been able to look at her then either, even if the matter seemed pretty trivial now. In any case, it'd felt wrong to make her cry two days in a row. But, he'd rationalized, he wasn't really the reason she was crying now. No, he'd just needed to walk away. She'd work better without him there.

"Well, I'll stay with her," he'd assured Jemma. "It's a long flight back, and she's in isolation, and…well, it's  _Skye_ , so…"

That had almost gotten a laugh out of her. "Yes, of course. Well…well, just tell her…" There'd been the slight hitch again. "Tell her not to worry, and that I'll be home as soon as I can, get it all sorted out. If…if you need help or anything, just-"

"Yeah. Got it."

She'd stepped forward then, only it was a bit hesitantly, like her feet had propelled her towards him of their own accord. Probably a fit of muscle memory or something. Whether she'd been about to hug him or grab onto his hand or some other terrifying gesture, Fitz hadn't been quite sure. Nor had he been too keen on finding out. He'd just needed to get out of there. Fast.

"Be careful, Jemma."

He hadn't waited for a response, and he hadn't looked back on his way out either. Even though every bit of him had sure as hell wanted to.

In his head, Fitz knew it was for the best. But with Skye in quarantine (asleep, if restlessly, in the Cage), and with the eerily silent Bus echoing with the ghosts of its permanently missing occupant, Fitz was painfully aware of Jemma's absence. And perhaps he  _was_  ignorant, or foolish, or in some kind of grief-induced shock, or a twisted mixture of it all. He couldn't help it. He still missed her.

Oh, well. He'd get over it.

Hopefully.

(Probably not.)

Fitz thought about talking to Mack. The prospect of having a conversation at the moment seemed daunting, but he figured Mack had always been able to know what Fitz meant, with or without words. The mechanic was currently in the cargo hold, though, enduring God knew what tests and procedures in order to fully make sure all the strange alien nonsense had left his system. And after that, well…Fitz had a feeling that Mack wouldn't be terribly eager for a chat anyway. Fitz repressed a shudder, trying and failing to forget those cold, black eyes, the eyes that he'd almost had to close for good…

Fitz unclenched his left fist and shook it out, continuing to pace the length of the plane. He tried to wipe off the clamminess onto his jeans. Even though he knew it was just sweat from having his hands balled up, he couldn't help but still feel the coolness of the gun in his hands, his finger poised to take the life of yet another team member.

How did you talk about something like that?

In the distance, Fitz heard a light clink, like that of a glass being set down on a counter. His eyes flicked over towards the end of the cabin, where Hunter and Bobbi were sitting at the bar. Hunter drank. Bobbi didn't. Neither of them spoke, or paid any attention to Fitz for that matter. But somehow Fitz still felt like he was intruding on a private moment.

Without giving it too much thought (probably an egregious error on his part), Fitz headed for the one place he knew he could be in peace. It wasn't a location he frequented often, since he wasn't completely daft. But every once in a while, when he knew his presence wouldn't be disruptive or when he thought he might like to catch a neat view or when he didn't particularly feel like talking to anyone, he ventured into the small space.

The first time he'd wandered into the cockpit, it had been entirely the result of an unfortunate accident. (Fitz had resolved then and there that any future pranking plans involve a reliable escape route and/or hiding place.) Much to his astonishment, May hadn't kicked him out.

"If you're gonna be in here, Fitz, you'll have to sit down."

"Oh, I, um…I was just, er…I wasn't –"

She hadn't even turned around, yet Fitz had known exactly what expression had been on her face.

So he'd sat down. And weirdly enough, it had been…nice. With May, Fitz didn't have to worry about making small talk, or fulfilling some kind of expectation, or feeling like he was under scrutiny. She simply flew the plane, and Fitz simply sat in peaceful quiet.

The cockpit was even more silent than usual this time. Night had already fallen, the only light coming from the illuminated control panel and the scattered city lights below. Fitz didn't hesitate for very long before carefully making his way to the co-pilot seat, mostly because he knew he'd receive some sort of scolding if he just stood around aimlessly.

They simply sat there for a while, the soft purr of the Bus's engine providing the only sound in the tiny room. Normally, Fitz tended to fiddle with something or other in his hands, a Rubik's Cube more often than not. But his hands were strangely still now, like they'd just given up trying. And why should they try? He hadn't been able to get his hands to do anything remotely useful in months.

Fitz didn't mind it, though. Not yet, at least. No, he was content to just sit there in silence, hurtling hundreds of miles and hour through the dark sky as he tried to avoid thinking about the horrific things he'd seen that day. It wouldn't be enough, sure. But it was something.

After a while, Fitz had become so lost in his own thoughts that he barely registered the slight rustle of plastic coming from somewhere over to his left. The next thing he knew, there was a small bag being held out to him, some kind of trail mix that was heavy on the sweets portion. On a normal day, Fitz would've gladly accepted whatever May had stashed in the cockpit for him, something she'd been doing ever since he'd stumbled in there the first time.

But the last thing he could think about right now was eating.

"Not hungry," he mumbled.

She didn't look at him, instead choosing to lean over and drop the bag in his lap. She didn't even have say anything either, yet Fitz knew exactly what she meant.  _Eat. Or else. (When's the last time you ate today, Fitz? I know you're upset but you need to take care of yourself. Hypoglycemics can't afford to forget about food.)_

It was weird, and more than a little concerning, that he got all that from a side-glare and a gesture. But he supposed he and May tended to operate on similar wavelengths. Sometimes.

He wasn't hungry, but he ate, or at least he faked it. He mostly just moved his hand in and out of the bag, letting the crinkle of plastic fill the space. It was easy to pretend. Easy to pretend he was actually eating, easy to pretend he was engrossed in the view over to his right, easy to pretend he couldn't see her reflection in the glass, the reflection of watery eyes shining in the moonlight.

Easy to say it was probably a trick of the light.

* * *

"You're right," Skye whispered in between sobs. "There's something very wrong with me."

Fitz wrapped his arms around her more tightly. "No, you're just different now," he assured her as she continued to cry into his shoulder. He'd said the words reflexively, partly out of guilt for the way he'd acted moments before and partly because he wanted to calm her down. But as he let the words sink in for a few seconds, he realized that they were true. And not just in relation to Skye.

"You're just different now," he repeated, wanting her to know what he wish someone had told him months ago. "And there's nothing wrong with that."

He held her for a while longer, and even though being crouched on the floor of the lab was more than a little uncomfortable, he waited until she'd mostly stopped crying before he let go.

"Come on," he murmured, helping her stand up and taking care not to put too much pressure on her bleeding hands. "Let's get you to bed."

She didn't argue with him, but she leaned against him as he led her out of the glass cage and down to her bunk. When they entered the room, Jemma seemed just about finished preparing the bed for her. (It was a bit scary, actually, how Jemma had managed to transform the usual mess of duvet and sheets into a somewhat recognizable sleeping space in the span of about ten minutes.) Fitz motioned for Skye to sit on the edge of the covers while he worked at properly cleaning up the cuts on her palms.

They worked in relative silence, only exchanging a few words here and there, mostly about logistical things. Fitz could feel Skye watching them as they moved about, her eyes clearly expressing her discomfort with keeping her secret from Jemma. But Fitz simply avoided the questions written on her face as he finished wrapping her bandages.

Before long, the two of them had managed to get Skye comfortably under the covers.

"Okay," Jemma said brightly, after plumping Skye's pillows for the third time. "Do you need me to get you anything else?"

"No, Jemma," Skye smiled, grabbing onto Jemma's arm to keep her from adjusting the pillows again. "I'm fine. Really. Thank you."

Jemma simply nodded, but after a beat she leaned forward and threw her arms around Skye. "I'm just really glad you're all right, Skye."

Skye returned the hug. Fitz could see her smile fade, though, as she rested her chin on Jemma's shoulder. "Me too," she lied.

Never one for prolonged displays of affection, Jemma soon straightened up and cleared her throat. "Well, I'm gonna go finish your report for the Playground's records," she announced while tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. "Lord knows Coulson's filing system doesn't need any more postponed paperwork. I'll have my phone, so just call me if you need anything?" She paused on her way out, her hands gripping the doorjamb.

Skye gave her a very convincing smile. "I will," she promised.

Jemma disappeared through the doorway, and Skye turned to Fitz after her footsteps had faded. "How long do you think we should wait?" she asked quietly. "Before we tell her?"

Fitz just shook his head. "I don't know, Skye," he told her honestly. "At least until she calms down on her whole shoot-first policy thing." The thought left a sour taste in his mouth. "I barely recognize her right now."

Skye looked uncomfortable, like she was internally trying to rationalize Jemma's behavior with her own fear of what might happen. "She's just…upset about Trip right now," she sighed. "We all are."

"I know, I know, it's not that," Fitz replied quickly. "I just…I just thought there was something…" What? He thought there was what? That things were going to go back to normal? That because she finished a couple of his sentences they were suddenly going to be FitzSimmons again? That because she found comfort in his touch earlier, he still knew what she was thinking? That there was a chance he was going to fully recover? No, the sooner he accepted that both he and Jemma had changed and permanently grown apart, the better off they'd all be.

"You know what? It's not important," he dismissed. "Hopefully in a few days this'll all blow over, and then we can tell her." He met Skye's gaze so he could make sure they were on the same page. His hands were shaking again. "But let's just give it a bit of time, yeah?"

"Okay," she whispered as she looked away, but not before Fitz had seen the tears. "I guess."

Oh, God. Fitz wasn't sure how much more crying he could handle in one day.

"Hey," he said, carefully sitting down on the edge of her bed. "What is it?"

She wiped away a stray tear that had escaped down her cheek. "I don't know if I can hide this for a few more days, Fitz," she explained with a strangled laugh. Her chin wobbled from the effort to keep from crying again. "You saw what happened back there."

He edged a little closer to her. "No, no, no," he insisted, hoping he'd be able to get the words out. "That…that was just because you were upset, okay? And rightfully so. All right? I was an arse back there." There. That managed to make her smile a bit.

Fitz let her collect herself before he broached the subject again. "Hey, um…have you thought about…well, I know you haven't had much time to consider it, since it only just happened, but –"

Skye was giving him that look she usually gave him when he was spiraling, so he took a deep breath and plunged forward. "But maybe…have you thought about trying to…control it?"

Skye looked up at the ceiling, obviously trying to contain a groan. "Fitz, I don't  _want_  to control it," she said wearily. "I want it to stop."

"All right, fine," he muttered. "Forget I said anything. Just, uh…we'll just have to make sure I don't yell at you for a little while." Her smile was fleeting this time, but he supposed the joke wasn't all that funny. He awkwardly patted the duvet. "Um…well, try and get some sleep, okay?"

He was about to head out when he felt her hand grab onto his.

"Hey, Fitz?" He stopped in his tracks, letting his face ask his implicit question. But Skye just stared into her lap. "I don't think I'll be able to sleep for a while."

Ah. Well. It'd certainly been some time, but Fitz figured if it would make Skye feel better, it wouldn't be so bad. And it's not like he had anything better to do. He held up a finger to let her know that he'd be back, and quickly dodged out the door.

Two minutes later, Fitz dropped a tub of ice cream and two spoons onto the bed, motioning for Skye to move over. "So what are we watching?"

She'd already gotten her laptop out and set it in front of them. "You pick."

"It was your idea!"

"I'm emotionally distraught, Fitz," she argued, but Fitz could tell she only half meant it. "I can't be entrusted with these kinds of decisions at the moment."

"Fine," Fitz mumbled in between bites of ice cream. "But if you don't like my choice, it is entirely your fault."

Skye rolled her eyes playfully and pushed the computer onto Fitz's side. "Just shut up and pick the movie."

Fitz tried to position himself so she couldn't see what he was typing, but as soon as he'd gotten the words in she was already criticizing his decision.

"Homeward Bound?" she asked with a raised eyebrow. "Really?"

"Hey, what did I just say?"

"I'm kidding," she laughed as she settled back into the pillows. "Sort of."

They watched the opening credits in silence, passing the tub of ice cream between them while Chance introduced everybody.

"You know what the base could really use?" Fitz asked.

"Let me guess. A monkey?"

"Well, naturally. But a dog would be nice too."

Skye looked at him skeptically. "Fitz, we're pretty much underground," she reasoned. "A dog would be miserable here."

"It was just an idea, okay?" Fitz replied, feeling extremely defensive. "Forgive me for trying to think of something that would brighten up the place."

"I'm sorry," Skye said with another laugh. She scraped at the bottom of the tub for the last bite. "It  _would_ be kinda nice, though," she added as an afterthought.

"There, you see? Not such a bad idea after all."

They grew quiet again, with Skye unconsciously moving closer to Fitz after she tossed aside the empty tub. (It hadn't even lasted five minutes, which was a new record for them.) Fitz didn't really mind Skye leaning her head on his shoulder either. It was strangely comforting. He knew she was feeling Trip's absence probably more than he was. Trip had become a frequent staple in their movie nights.

Sometime during the mom's wedding, Skye spoke up again.

"You know, I get that he's not their dad or whatever," she said. "But having a stepdad is  _not_ the end of the world."

Fitz had to admit that he hadn't really thought about it. It was an interesting topic, though. "Well, I mean…well, we don't know what happened to their real dad, do we?" he reasoned. "It could've been pretty bad." In fact, now that Fitz  _did_ think about it, it made a lot of sense. "It'd explain a lot about how protective Shadow is, actually. Their dad could've left them or something."

Skye let out a scoff. "Yeah, or gone on a killing spree trying to get Hope to go through some creepy-ass transformation."

"Yeah, or shot himself in the head while Peter was in the other room."

Crap. Had he actually said that out loud?

Yes, Fitz was sure he did, because next to him Skye had gone very,  _very_  still. What an absolute idiot he was. He'd been trying to make her feel slightly better about her situation and now he was undoubtedly going to have to answer a personal question.

Fitz felt like repeatedly banging his head on a wall.

Sure enough, Skye slowly sat up straight and looked at him with, oh Lord, was that  _concern_? For God's sake, this was ridiculous. (Meanwhile, on the forgotten computer screen, Chance was ripping a wedding cake to shreds.)

"You never talk about your dad," she finally said, so quietly he barely heard her.

He gave her a shrug, decidedly looking down at his hands. "Not much to say."

She didn't say anything for a while, but he could still feel her eyes boring into the side of his face. Eventually she took a shaky breath. "How old were you?"

Fitz debated whether or not he wanted to get into this conversation. Then again, he'd probably have to endure more of her distressed glances if he didn't just fess up. "Four," he said in a tight voice.

"Oh my God," she whispered. Yep. There were tears again. Not a whole lot, but they were there, all right.

He shook his head. "It was a long time ago."

"Still," she said quietly. "Fitz…how come you've never told me this?"

"You never asked." And then, because he felt like she was probably going to smack him for that, he corrected himself. "It's not really something I care to talk about, really," he told her honestly. "Okay? Simmons doesn't even know the whole story."

Skye didn't buy that either, but he actually  _was_  telling the truth. "She knows he died, but that's about it."

She hesitantly grabbed onto his hand just then, clearing her throat. In the back of his mind, Fitz registered that her fingers were strangely warm. "Well…you know I'm here if you want to talk," she said. "About anything. Right?"

The way Skye openly talked about her feelings was nice and all, but it was a bit much for Fitz, especially considering the conversation topic. But he wanted her to know that he appreciated the gesture. "Yeah," he smiled, giving her hand a small squeeze. "Thanks."

Skye squeezed his hand back before readjusting herself to finish watching the movie. She didn't say anything else until a little bit after the mountain lion part, even though Fitz could tell that her mind was on everything but the plot.

"I just have one question," she said, almost like she couldn't help herself. "And I swear this is the last time I'll bring it up."

Fitz gave a long sigh. "Fine," he relented. "Go ahead."

She took a moment to compose her thoughts. "If you're so upset with your dad…how come you go by your last name?"

It took Fitz a pause to figure out what the hell she was talking about. But then something clicked in his head.

"Oh, my mum and dad weren't married when I was born, so the hospital just ended up putting down Mum's surname," he explained with a shrug. "Never got around to changing it before…just, never got around to changing it, is all. Didn't really want to either."

"Hmm," was her only reply, which was a lot better than what he'd been expecting, to be honest. She threw him for a loop, though, when she said something else a few minutes later. "Daisy."

Fitz turned his head to look at her. "Sorry?"

She was staring at the movie, but her eyes were glazed over. "That's my name, I think," she said quietly. "It's what he called me anyway, back in San Juan." Fitz figured she must be talking about the psychotic man that claimed to be her father.

"It's funny," she scoffed. "I've spent my  _entire_  life trying to figure out who I was, where I came from. And now?" She shrugged noncommittally, like discovering the truth had taken all the energy out of her. "I don't know, it just feels weird. Daisy."

"Daisy," Fitz repeated, trying it out. "It's not so bad." He felt a grin tug on his lips. " _Definitely_ not as bad as –"

Skye glared at him. "Don't say it –"

"Leopold." He gave her a quizzical look, as if that hadn't been what he was going to say the whole time.

She rolled her eyes and pretended to punch him in the arm. "Jerk." But she was smiling too.

"I guess I can see it," Fitz admitted as he made a show of studying her face. "It'd be hard not to call you Skye, though." Then, as the thought occurred to him, "Where'd that come from anyway?"

Skye held up her hands. "Nowhere. I just thought it was cool. Which is crazy since apparently I'm part alien. So there's that." She sighed. "Turns out my entire life is just a really bad pun."

"Nah, Skye suits you, I think," Fitz assured her, despite the fact that she kind of had a point. "And it's  _loads_  better than M –"

Skye grabbed one of the extra pillows and whacked him. "Don't say it!"

Before he could retaliate, someone knocked on the doorway and came in the room. "Hey, is – oh," Hunter said, his eyes widening slightly at the spectacle in front of him. "Am I interrupting something?"

Skye's laughter died down as she seemed to remember their bleak situation. "What do you want, Hunter?"

Hunter pointed his thumb over his shoulder. "Drinks," he explained. "In the rec room. You know, for Trip. I mean, I know it's not much, but –"

"No, he'd like that," Skye said, a wistful smile on her face. "We'll meet you up there."

After Hunter left, Fitz watched Skye as she paused the movie and started getting out of the bed. He wasn't exactly certain alcohol and Memory Lane were what she needed right now.

"You sure?" he asked.

"Yeah," Skye nodded, holding out one of her bandaged hands. "Come on. We owe him at least a drink."

So Fitz followed her up to the recreation room, where Hunter had already passed around the beer. It was nice, he supposed, sharing stories about Trip and whatnot. But it wasn't what he'd deserved. Trip deserved nothing less than a hero's funeral, with shots fired into the sky and songs about hope and his family there to honor his life. The whole enchilada, as he would've said. Instead he got a darkened room filled with broken people, trying to pick up the pieces of who they'd been before. It was an eerie reflection of his life, really. He'd deserved infinitely better than what they'd had to offer him, and yet he'd still chosen to fight alongside them. He'd still chosen to stand with an organization that had crumbled around them. He'd still picked  _them_  to be his family.

It only made sense that they would let him down.


	6. S.O.S.: Part 2

"There, that should do it," Jemma announced brightly as she adjusted the straps on Skye's wrists. Despite her optimism, though, Fitz could tell that she was anxious to see Skye's reaction. "How does that feel? It's not too tight or anything, is it?"

Skye shook her head, but she was distracted by the new material on her arms. "No, no," she assured them. "But um…" She sighed a little, like she was trying to choose her words carefully. "Look, I appreciate what you guys are trying to do," she said as she glanced up at them from her seat. "Really, I do. It's just…last time I put these on, they kind of made me feel really dizzy."

A look of guilt flashed across Jemma's face. She wrung her hands together.

"That's because those other gloves were designed to inhibit your abilities, Skye," she admitted. "Not harness them. They acted as more of a sedative than anything else." Jemma's cheeks had turned pink, and she couldn't seem to look at Skye directly as she rambled on. "I'm…really sorry, we just didn't know what else to do. And Coulson was so worried that something would happen –"

"I know, Jemma," Skye told her, reaching out her hand to briefly grasp Jemma's. "It's okay. Believe me, back then all I wanted was for my powers to disappear too." She looked between Jemma and Fitz, as if to make sure they both heard her. "But I have a handle on them now. I can control them."

Fitz let out a scoff, remembering how Skye's current tactical prowess was a far cry from that of the hacker they'd met over a year ago. "We know you can," he promised. He felt his lips curl into a smile as he exchanged a glance with Jemma. "I, um…I think you might be misunderstanding what we're trying to say."

Her eyes flicked back and forth between the two of them. "What do you mean?" she asked warily.

Jemma was grinning too. "These new prototypes aren't for limiting your abilities," she explained. "They're for –"

"Making them bigger."

There was a pause as he and Jemma waited for Skye to figure it out. But even after her jaw went slack, Fitz could tell she was still confused.

"What?" she whispered.

Jemma nodded excitedly. "They're designed for long-ranged accuracy. With these gloves, you should theoretically be able to start an earthquake with an epicenter over a mile away."

"Yeah, so say you want to shake things up for the bad guy that got away," Fitz continued, holding up his hands to better illustrate the scenario. "He's sitting in his car, bobbing his head to the music, all smug 'cause he thinks he's won. But  _then_ , from out of nowhere…" Fitz clapped his hands together, pleased to see Skye jump a little. "Fifty-three point seven gigajoules of energy start below his feet. You kill the engine, lock up the power steering, and boom. Bob's your uncle, Fanny's your aunt, and your guy's a sitting duck on the highway, just waiting for us to pick him up."

Skye's expression had gone from confusion to something closer to excitement. But after a moment she shook her head.

"Gigajoules?"

Fitz briefly closed his eyes. He'd tried so hard. "It's about four on the Richter scale," he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. "It was just an example. The point is –"

"You'll be able to focus your abilities with much greater precision using these gauntlets," Jemma finished, while Fitz nodded his head in agreement. "But…well, I mean…if you don't want them, I'm sure it'll be fine." Jemma cleared her throat nervously. "We just thought –"

"No, they're perfect, guys," Skye smiled, standing up to hug the two of them at the same time. After a moment, Fitz patted her somewhat awkwardly on the back. It amused him a little when he noticed Jemma doing the same thing on Skye's opposite side.

"Thank you," she whispered. "This is…it means a lot." Fitz had expected her to let go then, but her grip actually grew tighter. "God, I missed you both."

"We missed you too," Jemma said quietly.

And it was true. When Skye had been at Afterlife, the base had felt much emptier. Lifeless, almost. Having her back with them, not only as part of S.H.I.E.L.D. but physically there at the Playground, felt right. Natural. Fitz knew things could never go back to how they'd been before. (The remnants of the Bus scattered in the Arctic was testament enough to that.) But maybe that was okay. Maybe they could find their way again, together, as a new team.

Eventually, Skye pulled away and looked down at her gauntlets. She seemed much more enthused with them than she'd been when Jemma had first put them on.

"I don't know," she laughed, though there was a bitter tone to it. "Anyone get the feeling this is too much power for me? I mean, something bad's bound to happen. We have pretty awful luck around here."

"Sure," Fitz shrugged. "So maybe we should just start making our own."

Skye gave him a small smile, like she wanted to believe him but was certain that she was going to singlehandedly ruin everything.

"Skye," Coulson said from the doorway. His arm was cradled in a sling, yet another reminder that they'd all endured irreversible change. "You ready to go?"

Skye gave him a nod. "Be right there."

As Coulson disappeared down the hallway, Fitz began helping Skye remove the gauntlet prototypes. He handed them off to Jemma, who put them back amongst the rest of Skye's new tactical gear. The excitement that had been on Skye's face earlier faded drastically.

"You nervous?" he asked her.

Skye looked forlornly down at the ground. "No," she said with a sigh, slinging her bag over her shoulder. "Just a little bummed out, I guess. I finally just started getting to know him, you know?" Fitz nodded in sympathy, even though all he could see in his mind's eye was that terrifying creature tearing apart the lab. "But it's the best option for him right now."

That Fitz could agree with. There were a lot of things about the T.A.H.I.T.I. program that were problematic, and neither he nor Jemma had been particularly supportive of the decision. But it was a lot better than the alternative.

"Yeah," he said quietly. "Well. We'll be here when you get back."

Jemma apparently read his mind. "Yes," she agreed. "We haven't had a movie night in  _ages_."

"Sounds good," Skye smiled before she headed towards the door. She waved to them on her way out. "Wish me luck."

It wasn't until Skye's footsteps faded in the distance that Fitz realized he was in a room alone with Jemma for the first time since he'd left for the  _Iliad_  mission. And it wasn't that he minded being alone with Jemma or anything. It was just that before he'd taken off, she'd said something strange to him.

Something very,  _very_  strange.

Something that he felt needed a bit of clarifying.

Fitz was still looking at the doorway, but he could feel Jemma next to him going through some kind of internal argument, complete with fidgeting hands and all. He had no idea what he was going to say, or if he should try to say anything at all, really. But he felt like he should at least make an attempt. He took a breath and turned to face her, opening his mouth to speak.

She beat him to the punch. "Fitz, before you say anything, could I just…could you let me go first?" she asked in a rush. Her eyes were closed, almost as if she were embarrassed or something. "Please."

Fitz let the words die on his tongue. She still wasn't looking at him, though.

"Yeah," he murmured. "Go ahead."

Jemma took a deep breath. "I need you to understand…why I left."

Oh, bloody hell. Fitz supposed he should've known this was coming. "Jemma, stop," he said as gently as he could. "You don't have to –"

"Please, Fitz," she interrupted. Her hands were balled into fists at her side. "I just need to get this out." She looked up at him briefly, and Fitz was mortified to see tears in her eyes. "I left because…I was making you worse."

Fitz felt like the wind had gotten knocked out of him. Of all the things Jemma could have possibly said, what she actually said hadn't even been on Fitz's list. And after months of going through the hundreds of scenarios in his head, Fitz had had a  _long_  list.

"What?" he whispered.

Jemma shook her head, a tear escaping down her cheek. "Everyone could see it, Fitz," she said in a shaky voice. "Not just me. And it took me  _so_  long to accept it too, because I thought…no, that couldn't be right. There's no  _way_  I could halting your recovery because there was no one else that wanted to help you more than I did." Her eyelids fluttered shut for a moment. "More than I  _do_. But…but I was wrong. I was wrong, and you weren't improving, and I knew it was because I was there, so…so I left."

She paused in her rambling to look up at him again. "You have to understand, Fitz," she pleaded. "I didn't leave because of what happened to you or because of what you said to me at the bottom of the ocean. I meant what I said down there too. That you're my best friend in the whole world and the last thing I ever wanted to do was to see you get hurt." She took a step closer to him, although Fitz noticed she took great care not to touch him. "I've never thought you were useless, Fitz, not once. But I had to accept the truth that…that you weren't getting better. At least not with me around."

There were so many things she was saying, so many bottled-up thoughts and old issues, that Fitz was having a hard time processing it all. He must have had a strange look on his face or something, because Jemma just stared at him nervously for a few seconds. "All right, could you please say something, Fitz?" she asked with a sigh. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

Fitz sifted through her words in his mind, eventually latching onto the one thing he couldn't quite understand.

"I'm always better when you're around."

Her lips parted a little, like she too was caught off-guard by his words. He didn't think what he'd said had been all that shocking, though. It was simply the truth. It'd been true the day they'd met at the Academy, it'd been true when they'd worked together at SciOps, it'd been true when she'd dragged him along on this crazy bloody adventure, and it was true now. Through every argument, through every sleepless night working in the lab, through every separation, through every irritated word spoken out of spite. After everything, it was still true. She was first and foremost his best friend in the entire world, and no matter what he might say in fits of desperate anger, he would always choose life with her over life without her. Every time.

The moment stretched out between the two of them, like neither of them was quite sure what to say or where to go from there. Fitz was only somewhat thankful when Mack appeared in the doorway.

"Hey, Turbo. You got a minute?"

Fitz's gaze broke away from Jemma's as he tried to focus his attention on Mack. Off to the side, Jemma inhaled sharply and turned away, so Fitz stepped towards the door to let her collect herself.

"What is it?"

Mack looked like he regretted interrupting them. He gave Fitz an apologetic smile and pointed his thumb down the hallway. "I just got done with inventory and was heading down the hangar," he explained. "You coming?"

Fitz glanced back at Jemma, who was apparently deeply engrossed with her paperwork and the giant rock in the glass cage. He didn't know if he was fully ready, but he did know that as much as he enjoyed Mack's company, the garage was not really all that exciting to him.

He placed his left fist in his right hand, not sure why he was so nervous all of a sudden. "Actually, I um…I think I'm gonna stay and help out with –"

"Oh, you go ahead, Fitz," Jemma told him with a smile. "I'm just about finished here."

"Well, it's just that I was thinking about…er…well, I was thinking that maybe I could start working in the lab again."

He'd said the words hurriedly, so his mind wouldn't have time to back out of it. But he was still anxious to see how they'd both respond.

Jemma simply looked up from her tablet, where she was logging the physical properties of the monolith. She seemed surprised, but Fitz was relieved to see it was more on the pleasantly surprised side. "Oh," was all she said.

Fitz waved his hand around, not wanting either of them to make a big deal of it. "Yeah, Coulson's got me drawing up some designs for the new mobile command center."

"Let me guess," Mack spoke up. He had a smirk on his face. "The Bus two point oh?"

"Oh, well it's, uh…well, I've actually been tossing around a couple other names."

"He doesn't like to reuse names," Jemma explained.

Fitz might have rolled his eyes, but he was just thankful that Jemma understood what he meant. "Exactly," he said, growing a bit more excited. "And the plane's a lot different from the original, more like a cross between a Quinjet and a Helicarrier. So I was actually thinking something more along the lines of, get this…" He held up his hands for dramatic effect. "Zephyr One."

Mack let out a laugh. "I like it," he smiled, his eyes telling Fitz that he was okay with the decision (the  _other_  decision). "Well, you do whatever you want, man." He tapped the door on his way out and pointed his finger at Fitz. "But don't think you're getting out of COD later."

"Wouldn't miss it," Fitz assured him.

As Mack headed down to the hangar, Fitz turned back to Jemma. She was still working, but she flashed a smile at Fitz.

"Back to the lab, huh?"

"Figured it'd make sense," Fitz said, trying to brush it off. "Unless…that is, unless you don't want me to –"

"You're always welcome, Dr. Fitz," she told him softly, and though her eyes were trained on the monolith, he saw that she was still smiling.

Would it be difficult to work in the lab again? Probably. But Fitz knew that it was where he belonged, disability or not. He'd spent so much time locked in his own mind, so much time doubting his worth to the team, that he never stopped to think about how this was home to him. This. Not the Playground, or the Bus, or even the lab back at the Academy. These people, people that cared about him, people that refused to give up on him, were his home. Doing what he loved, exploring science and the world with his best friend, was more than enough for him. And sure, maybe it wasn't the picture-perfect family. Maybe it wasn't what he'd had in mind all those years ago when he'd hopped on a plane to America. They undoubtedly had troubles ahead of them, what with the Inhumans and Ward and HYDRA still out there. But they were together, and they would find a way to get through whatever lay ahead. And that was all that mattered, really.

Hope brewing in his chest for the first time in what felt like forever, Fitz turned towards Jemma. He felt his legs itching to move, but he refused to pace the floor, instead planting his feet firmly in the ground. For her part, Jemma was oblivious to him, working diligently on the monolith's paperwork. But Fitz was okay with that. He might be able to get the words out better if she wasn't looking directly at him.

"So, um…J…hmm. Er…"

For goodness' sake, he just needed to spit it out. A sentence, a simple sentence. A question, really. Any form of human communication. Eventually he settled on a single word, hoping to God she would understand.

"Dinner?"

FIN

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd like to give a huge thank you to everyone that has taken the time to read this story. I feel like I probably say that with every story, but this one was a big one for me. Not big in terms of length, but big in terms of the headspace I had to get into and the emotional stress I went through while I was writing it. As someone who has never had to press pause on a story before, it can get really easy to fall into the trap of thinking that maybe people just don't care about it anymore. After all, it took me forever to update it, right? People probably don't even remember it, let alone care if I finish it. So really, I cannot thank those beautiful individuals that encouraged me to continue writing enough. You are my inspiration when I can't find the strength to inspire myself. Thank you thank you thank you.
> 
> I'd also like to formally thank Mae, for whom this story was originally written. You are a wonderful friend and I've loved getting to know you during this whole process. I really hope I did your prompt justice, and that you enjoy the final product.
> 
> Another thank you to my lovely sister Chloe for lending her voice to the soundtrack. Her track "Get Home" will be added to the track listing as soon as she sends me the file. Also thank you to my best friend Gabriella, who also participated in my follower celebration by painting a crossover wallpaper and being my general soundboard for all my wacky ideas. You both keep me sane.
> 
> Below is a link to the story's soundtrack as well as the track listing. These are just a collection of songs that I was inspired by while writing this, as well as some songs that Mae exposed me to. (Your taste in music is impeccable, darlin.) The tracks are in some semblance of chronological order, but most of the songs can be applied to more than one scene/character, so feel free to make your own interpretations.
> 
> http://8tracks.com/msdevindanielle/remains
> 
> 1\. Marvel Studios Fanfare - Brian Tyler
> 
> 2\. Remains - Maurissa Tancharoen & Jed Whedon
> 
> 3\. The Mute - Radical Face
> 
> 4\. Smother - Daughter
> 
> 5\. Blackbird Song - Lee DeWyze
> 
> 6\. Jumper - Boyce Avenue
> 
> 7\. Element - Moses Mayfield
> 
> 8\. Last of Days - A Fine Frenzy
> 
> 9\. Let Her Go - Tyler Ward
> 
> 10\. The Days - Jasmine Thompson
> 
> 11\. Freight Train - Sara Jackson-Holman
> 
> 12\. Strong - London Grammar
> 
> 13\. Iron - Woodkid
> 
> 14\. Little Lion Man - Mumford & Sons
> 
> 15\. All I Want - Kodaline
> 
> 16\. My Immortal (Band version) - Evanescence
> 
> 17\. Lonely Ghosts - O+S
> 
> 18\. Black Bear - Andrew Belle
> 
> 19\. Painting Flowers - All Time Low
> 
> 20\. Into Eternity - Brian Tyler
> 
> 21\. Get Home - Chloe Elizabeth
> 
> 22\. This Is Gospel (Piano Version) - Brendon Urie
> 
> 23\. We Might As Well Be Strangers - Keane
> 
> 24\. Name - Goo Goo Dolls
> 
> 25\. No, I Don't Remember (Unplugged) - Anna Ternheim
> 
> 26\. To Build a Home - The Cinematic Orchestra featuring Patrick Watson
> 
> 27\. This Love - Taylor Swift
> 
> 28\. Now Comes the Night - Rob Thomas
> 
> 29\. Home - Gabrielle Aplin
> 
> 30\. Luck - American Authors
> 
> Thank you so much again for reading. Seriously, you all are amazing.
> 
> Much love,
> 
> MsDevinDanielle


End file.
